The olive grove: dozens of tombs of individuals buried with flames in Chile reveal an historic connection | Science | EUROtoday

A couple of a long time earlier than Diego de Almagro and his males arrived in 1536 to what shortly after was La Serena (northern Chile), the inhabitants of the Elqui River Valley have been nonetheless buried with flames that appeared to hug them. Now, a multidisciplinary examine has studied the stays of camelids. From their bones to their genes, by the tartar of their tooth, they’ve served to find out that the animals have been home. They started to bury them collectively across the yr 1000 of this period and stopped doing it when the Incas, who thought-about the flame a easy beast of load, started to bury their very own on these joint tombs.

In 2014, when the Pan -American Highway was going to be unfolded, the employees discovered human stays. An excavation started then earlier than progress erased the story. The Chilean National Monuments Council protected an space of ​​380 meters by 50 meters. That was the floor probes by the group of the archaeologist Paola González, of the El Olivar Foundation, which takes the identify of the positioning that they’d simply found. “An archaeological rescue was made, between 2015 and 2017, in two of the eight funeral areas detected,” says the researcher. They took 5 containers from there, with 1,500 containers of fabric. The most related have been 56 camelids and greater than 200 human our bodies. They nonetheless have years to research all the pieces.

One of the primary fruits that Olivar has given, positioned 4 kilometers north of La Serena and a pair of,500 meters of the Pacific, has been the examine of the camelids buried with people. “The big question was whether domestic or wild animals were, in this case the guanaco, because our area does have a lot of guanaco in the wild,” says González. Science considers it demonstrated that flames (Lama glam) come from guanaco (Long guanicoe) and that there have been a number of domestication processes in a number of Andean areas.

The very first thing they did was analyze the animals of the animals. During the domestication course of, the flames dwarfed in comparison with the Guanacos. “But it was not conclusive,” says the archaeologist. Then they continued with an isotopic evaluation of the bones, an oblique methodology to know what eaten up to now. The relationship of components comparable to nitrogen or carbon revealed that they’d a combined weight-reduction plan, of untamed crops, “but also of C4 plants, a chemical indicator typical of corn,” provides González. But it did not appear the definitive take a look at, so that they adopted, now, searching for pathologies. “Some of these animals had a disease called polydactyly, which has a finger more[las llamas son artiodáctilos, es decir, tienen dos dedos en sus pezuñas]this causes them to be listed animals, but they reached adult life, ”the researcher expands. Only a home animal that wools is achieved, however listed would proceed to have braveness to maneuver ahead.

Even so, they did two extra checks. One was to look within the denture tartar stays of his weight-reduction plan. Previous research had already proven that fossilized micro organism of tartar could be a window to the previous; The different, a genetic evaluation. They discovered stays of corn and pumpkin or pumpkin. “Archeobotany experts confirmed that the pumpkin was boiled, so they gave it as a porridge,” González element. The final take a look at, the genetic evaluation, was carried out by the geneticist of the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and co -author of the examine, Michael Westbury. It was the definitive proof. “He determined that these animals were Guanicoe chilensisalthough it has a wild version, it also domesticated at a certain time, ”explains the archaeologist. The most relevant thing is that they did not exist in the region,“ they do not come from the Chilean semi -arid northern area, but that from much further north, of the Bolivian highlands or areas of Peru. The interesting thing is that these flames did not arrive alone, but that there is already clear for me, an arrival of a population of high -hall shepherds, ”it ends. It is these shepherds who brought the practice of being buried next to their flames.

Patricio López, from the Natural and Cultural History Museum of the Atacama Desert (Chile) and the first author of the new study, argues that “there isn’t a data that helps an area domestication course of.” Although it does not rule out that it was a process on-sitethey would need to review a temporary sequence of several thousand years that are the ones that would have been needed to complete the process. “In the actual case of El Olivar, the presence of domesticated camelids, on this case you name, we presumably affiliate it with an alternate of information and knowledge with teams of northern Chile and/or northwest of Argentina,” completes in an email.

The determination of the domestic state of the flames and its origin is key to better understanding the joint burials. According to radiocarbon dating, they began around 1090. The first thing that caught the attention to archaeologists was the disposition of bodies, both, humans and animals, in a lateral fetal position, as lying. “They have a look at one another, between human and camelid describe these symmetrical figures, the place is completely non -anatomical, that’s, no camelid, takes this place of lateral dice flexed identically to the human being when he dies,” recalls the archaeologist Paola González. For her, “they’re marking some luck as a merger of identities, of accompaniment; if we search for one thing to assimilate it, I might say that it’s accompanying on this transit to the human being,” he adds. Although he remembers that archeology cannot give for certain things that can only be glimpsed, “there’s a very noticeable effort to humanize the human-love relationship.”

When the Incas conquer the territory (between 1440 and 1470, according to several dates), the burials of flames and humans end. The Incas used them as cargo animals and for them they should not have the symbolism they did for the inhabitants of El Olivar. In fact, they bury their dead in Sisters, a kind of sarcophagus that place on top of the old joint graves.

Although there are animal burial information, particularly canines, or mummification, as they did in historic Egypt, in different cultures of the previous, there are hardly any circumstances of joint burials. And the few which are of some highlighted character with horses or in sacrifices occasions. Nothing as within the olive grove. And the 56 flames recovered within the olive grove aren’t the one ones. There are nonetheless a number of areas to dig up and, thankfully, the Chilean authorities ended up diverting the highway.