Why dig looted tombs? Two examples and some answers from Keushu (Ancash highlands, Peru)

Looted tombs at Andean archaeological sites are largely the result of a long tradition of trade in archaeological artefacts coupled with the 17th century policy of eradicating ancestor veneration and destroying mortuary evidence in a bid to “extirpate idolatry”. On the surface, looted funerary contexts often present abundant disarticulated and displaced human remains as well as an apparent absence of mortuary accoutrements. What kind of information can archaeologists and biological anthropologists hope to gather from such contexts? In order to gauge the methodological possibilities and interpretative limitations of targeting looted tombs, we fully excavated two collective funerary contexts at the archaeological site of Keushu (district and province of Yungay, Ancash, Peru; c. 2000 B.C.-A.D. 1600), which includes several dozen tombs, many built under large boulders or rock shelters, all of which appear disturbed by looting. The first is located in the ceremonial sector and excavation yielded information on four individuals; the second, in the funerary and residential sector, held the remains of seventy individuals - adults and juveniles. Here, we present and discuss the recovered data and suggest that careful, joint excavations by archaeologists and biological anthropologists can retrieve evidence of past mortuary practices, aid the biological characterisation of mortuary populations and help distinguish between a broad range of looting practices and post-depositional processes

Taiwan Aboriginals and Peoples of the Pacific-Asia Region: Multivariate Craniometric Comparisons.

RefereedStepwise discriminant function analysis and Mahalanobis’s generalized distance are applied to twenty-nine cranial measurements recorded in 2,531 male crania representing five Taiwan aboriginal cranial series and fifty prehistoric, modern, and near modern human groups. The Taiwan aboriginal cranial series include modern samples of Atayal, Bunun, Pazeh, Babuza, and archaeological human remains from the Shi San Hang site (ca 1800-500 BP). The comparative cranial series represent East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. The results of two separate analyses, one using five and the other using fifty-five groups, are presented. A relatively close connection between the Babuza, Pazeh, and Shi San Hang aboriginal cranial series is observed while the Atayal and Bunun series remain relatively well differentiated. Connections between Taiwan aboriginal groups and cranial series from Polynesia suggest that Taiwan’s aboriginal inhabitants may have been the ancestral source of these inhabitants of Remote Oceania. Similarly, these results suggest that the ultimate source of Taiwan’s prehistoric and modern aboriginal groups may be among the early inhabitants of eastern (Northeast or Southeast) Asia. The results of the present craniometric analysis are compared with other lines of evidence which have been used to examine the affinities and origins of Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples