[Aztlan] NAZCA DECAPITATION RITES

[michael ruggeri]

Contact: Suzanne Wu
swu at press.uchicago.edu
773-834-0386
University of Chicago Press Journals
Decapitation and rebirth

Recently excavated headless skeleton expands understanding of ancient  
Andean rituals

Images of disembodied heads are widespread in the art of Nasca, a  
culture based on the southern coast of Peru from AD 1 to AD 750. But  
despite this evidence and large numbers of trophy heads in the  
region’s archaeological record, only eight headless bodies have been  
recovered with evidence of decapitation, explains Christina A. Conlee  
(Texas State University). Conlee’s analysis of a newly excavated  
headless body from the site of La Tiza provides important new data on  
decapitation and its relationship to ancient ideas of death and  
regeneration.

As Conlee outlines in the June issue of Current Anthropology, the  
third vertebrae of the La Tiza skeleton has dark cut marks, rounded  
edges, and no evidence of flaking or breakage, indicating  
decapitation occurred at or very soon after the time of death. A  
ceramic jar decorated with an image of a head was placed next to the  
body. The head has a tree with eyes growing out of it, the branches  
encircling the vessel.

"Ritual battles often take place just before plowing for potato  
planting, and trees and unripened fruit figure in these rituals, in  
which the shedding of blood is necessary to nourish the earth to  
produce a good harvest," Conlee writes. "The presence of scalp cuts  
on Nasca trophy heads suggests the letting of blood was an important  
part of the ritual that resulted in decapitation."

Conlee also points to damage on the jar that indicates it had already  
been handled and used before being included in the tomb. This was  
only the third head jar found with a headless skeleton. Most are  
found at domestic sites, and prior research has concluded that they  
were probably used to drink from, most likely in connection with  
fertility rituals. "If the head jar was used to drink from during  
fertility rituals, then its inclusion in the burial further  
strengthens the relationship between decapitation and rebirth,"  
Conlee explains.

Notably, there is also no evidence of habitation in the La Tiza  
region during the Middle Nasca period (AD 450-550), to which the head  
jar dates. All of the Nasca domestic sites in the area date to the  
Early Nasca, indicating that the La Tiza skeleton may have been  
deliberately buried in an abandoned settlement that was associated  
with the ancestors.

"Human sacrifice and decapitation were part of powerful rituals that  
would have allayed fears by invoking the ancestors to ensure  
fertility and the continuation of Nasca society," Conlee writes. "The  
decapitation of the La Tiza individual appears to have been part of a  
ritual associated with ensuring agricultural fertility and the  
continuation of life and rebirth of the community."

###
Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,  
Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research  
on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological  
scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate  
species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features  
papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and  
physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory,  
archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics. For more  
information, please see our Web site: www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA

Christina A. Conlee, "Decapitation and Rebirth: A Headless Burial  
from Nasca, Peru." Current Anthropology 48:3.




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