Conference: 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA2024).
Title presentation: “Characterization of a Multiple Burial context from Pachacamac, Peru: Complementarity between Bioarchaeology and Molecular Archaeology“.
Authors: Nathalie Suarez Gonzalez, Lawrence S. Owens, Gontran Sonet, Peter Eeckhout.
Location: New Orleans, USA.
Date: 17-21 April 2024.
Summary: Pachacamac, on the Pacific coast of Peru, is a major pre-Columbian site in the Central Andes covering approximately 6 km2 and occupied by humans for over a thousand years before the Spanish conquest at the beginning of the 16th century. In 2012, the Ychsma Project discovered a unique LIP (900 to 1470 AD) multiple burial named Cx4 made of two funerary chambers with a vegetal roof structure, containing over 110 intact and fragmentary deceased together with numerous grave goods. More than 60% of the individuals are subadults whose sex cannot be assigned based on osteological observations. Amongst the adults, 23 females and 20 males were identified, and the sex of the remaining 4 individuals couldn’t be assigned with certainty. Using a complementary approach combining bioarchaeology and molecular archaeology, we aim at characterizing all the Cx4 individuals. Despite an important human modern contamination and a low amount of endogenous ancient DNA, our results show that sex could be assigned genetically in >70% of the cases including subadults. Sex identification of infants, children and adolescents is crucial to fully understand the organisation of this complex context and its funerary recruitment, and to perform an integrated and holistic analysis of all associated data.
