Ancient mortuary sheds light on early burial rites

Traci Watson, Special for USA TODAY | USAToday

An ancient mortuary where bits of human corpses apparently were defleshed and cleaned to yield easy-to-carry pieces has been discovered in the foothills of the Andes Mountains in South America.

Inside the mortuary's stone-and-adobe walls, ritual specialists boiled body parts in pots of quicklime to help strip tissue off the bones, researchers believe.

The end product of that grisly work: relics that could easily be carried on the road by people who lived in the region more than a thousand years ago and seem to have had both a reverence for the dead and a highly unsettled lifestyle.

The process created "portable ancestors for a mobile population," said study co-author Scott C. Smith, an archaeologist at Franklin & Marshall College. The discovery shows "the dead still played an active and important role in the lives of the living."

Nothing terribly exciting was expected from the patch of earth that Smith and a colleague began excavating a decade ago in western Bolivia at a religious complex called Khonkho Wankane.

The spot where the researchers were digging was a good distance from Khonkho's sunken temples, which at the time were thought to be the focal point of the site.

But the unpromising ground yielded a spectacular find.

Smith and his colleague, Maribel Pérez Arias of the University of Pittsburgh, gradually uncovered a circular building whose floor was strewn with a rich and puzzling variety of objects. There were nearly 1,000 teeth and small bones, mostly from the feet and hands and most sheathed in a thin layer of white plaster. There were plaster-coated ceramic pots and plaster-coated tools made from llama bones.

And there were small blocks made of a white, chalky substance. Researchers had identified similar blocks found at nearby sites as crucibles or molds for metalworking. But tests showed the white blocks at Khonkho are probably quicklime, made by heating limestone.

A quicklime-water blend has a notable property: It can help remove the tissue and fat from bones. Pérez has seen such a mixture being used in Bolivia to prepare skeletons for medical training. Exposed to air, the mixture turns into a white plaster.

Inside the mortuary, the researchers found a number of body parts coated with just such white plaster, among them a piece of skull, an intact set of hand bones and an intact set of foot bones. Outside the mortuary, carvings on a stone pillar depict a human with defleshed ribs.

Taken together, the artifacts suggest that bodies were taken apart at the site, partially stripped of flesh and then cleaned in lime water inside the mortuary, which was in use for perhaps 400 years. The big bones were then borne away from the site, the researchers argue.

The find is reported in the current edition of Antiquity.

The dead were a prominent part of life in other nearby communities, Smith says, and were even taken out of their tombs for rituals and political consultations.

The people who stopped at Khonkho were itinerant llama drovers whose way of life made it impossible for them to live close to burial sites. The evidence suggests they took their dead on the road instead.

The new report is "intriguing," said Deborah Blom of the University of Vermont, who has done research in the region, including at Khonkho. She notes that there's evidence from earlier and later sites in the region that people defleshed the remains of their ancestors.

It's "likely," she said via e-mail, "that llama caravaneers would want to bring their deceased with them, perhaps for burial elsewhere. … The dead were very much a part of life in ancient South America."