Broken noses for the gods: ritual battles in the Atacama Desert during the Tiwanaku period.
The sample consists of 226 skulls from the Atacameño cemetery of Coyo Oriente (639-910 AD), associated with the Tiwanaku period. The authors analyzed signs of acute trauma typically associated with violence, and the results were 12% of men and 9.9% of women displaying any type of lesion related to violence. In males, concentration of these non-lethal lesions in the nasal region (10.4%) as opposed to a random distribution over the entire skull (1.6%), suggests that the blows were struck during rituals. The cultural context of this period, with a strong ideological influence from Tiwanaku, supports the ritual hypothesis, since both the ethnographic as well as archeological records point to the existence of non-lethal violent bleeding with ritual beating to the face. Such rituals persist to this day among certain Andean populations. Among women, the most plausible hypothesis for the lesions (3.9% in the skull, 4.9% in the nasal bones, and 0.9% in the face) is domestic conflicts, since they show a random distribution. Previous studies with other Atacameño samples had indicated the same results for women.
Lessa
Andrea
A
Departamento de Endemias Samuel Pessoa, Escola Nacional de Saude Publica Sergio Arouca- Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. lessa@ensp.fiocruz.br
de Souza
Sheila Maria Ferraz Mendonça
SM
D002562:Ceremonial Behavior; D002677:Chile; D005260:Female; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D007199:Indians, South American / Q000266:history*; D008297:Male; D009295:Nasal Bone / Q000293:injuries*; D010164:Paleopathology; D012887:Skull Fractures / Q000266:history*