 Today's speaker in our brown bag series is Dr. Professor Bruce Owen from Sonoma State Department of Anthropology where I believe he's been since 1996, if I remember his CV correctly. He hails from Palo Alto, but he was an undergrad at Yale University and I've seen that he was doing historical archaeology in central Connecticut, I guess, about the same time as I was as an undergrad at Westland a couple years later. But then he came back to California for graduate school where he got his MA and PhD in anthropology at UCLA. He is an andinist with special research interests in complex societies, the collapse thereof, computer methods in archaeology. And let's see if I can consult my notes. Yes, I guess he works on Tiwanaku and Wadi in the Andean context. Also interested in pre-Columbian metals, radio carbon dating, all kinds of things. Today he's going to talk to us about a super interesting mortuary ritual space of roughly contact period and the central highlands of Peru that was excavated as part of the Upper Montara Archaeological Research Project which I understand Christine also is associated with or maybe directs or something. I'm not sure what that is. I'm not an andinist. But he's going to tell us about the new facts and I assume it's interpretations of this interesting cluster feature. So without further ado, I'll turn things over to Bruce Ahn. Well, thank you all for coming and you've had this to look at for a while. So let me just give you a little warning here. There are going to be pictures of human remains and some discussion of fairly nasty violence and I'm not a bloodthirsty person but if that bothers anyone you might just think about it. In addition, I'm going to be giving you what's really a progress report on an ongoing project. So there are lots of loose ends remaining to be tied up. There's a lot of further analysis to be done. There's a lot of things that still need to be interpreted. So any ideas from some of the illustrious faces that I see in this crowd and those who I don't know yet, I would love to hear. All right, so there's South America. We are going to be going to the central highlands of Peru near a place called Haucha where the Alpermontaro Archaeological Research Project was done near Haucha, Peru. Mostly the part that I'm going to be talking about between 1977 and 1983, in particular 1982 and 1983 plus the field season in 1986 which was the last one because terrorism got out of hand and we had to leave the region. Some of us had to do our dissertations in other places and have subsequently started working on other things. However, Christine Hastorf is directing an archiving project to consolidate the material, the paper records, the film, all the computer records especially and have them permanently archived here for future people to study, future students to study. And this also involves new analyses of the old material. And I'll explain to you why that's still useful. There's a lot still to be done with this material. So we're going to have a look at that. So first of all, let me give you an idea of what time period we're talking about here. This is, all right. So I'm going to begin with the Wonka 1 period which I'm going to tell you nothing about up to about 1350. Then the first period that we're going to be interested in, theoretically, well, that we were interested in in the Alpermontaro Archaeological Research Project was Wonka 2, which is the later part of the late intermediate period. Up to about 1460, this is a time when the region was occupied by a number of apparently relatively complex chieftains that were in competition with each other. They were located in fortified hilltop settlements. And we thought at the time and probably still reasonably fair that this is a representation of indigenous chieftain level social and political complexity. Then the Inca came in and stomped all over them, threatened them with a giant army and subjugated the people who sometimes are called Wonka more correctly. They're called Sousa, but we were using Wonka when we named the periods. We've changed the spelling as well. So after the Inca came in with their army, they incorporated the region into their empire, into their complex state. And we have the Wonka 3 period, the late horizon, the Inca empire. And so in this period, those same political units became subjects of the Inca and had to respond to their demands in one way or another. That was terminated by the Spanish coming in and stomping all over everyone with their weapons. And we're going to be hearing a little bit more about that, which leads into Wonka 4, which is the early Spanish colonial period with a somewhat arbitrary stopping date. It's a historical basis, but not really relevant to us. At this time, the Spanish occupied the town of Halcha, which is in our study area and right adjacent to the site that I'm going to be talking about. And then time goes on. So what were we up to with Umar? Our main interest was in the craft economy, subsistence economy, and political economy, maybe especially political economy, and how it changed, how it was constituted indigenously before the Inca, and how it changed under external imperial rule. So we were interested in what the Inca were up to, and we were interested in how what we could learn about chieftains before that by contrast. How are we going to do that? Well, the idea was to look at two time periods, the one immediately before Inca conquest and the one immediately after Inca conquest, and how we were going to address the political and economic organization was by in part, at least by contrasting what we identified in advance as commoner households and elite households. So we had basically a research design that involved a four way partition of our evidence that we were going to collect and did collect. So we had two periods, Wonka II and Wonka III with households from various different sites and we had classified them before excavating. So we weren't biasing our data and the excavations bore out our classifications as elite or commoner. So finally, when we did our analysis, a lot of it was comparing elites and commoners, what relationship was between them in Wonka II and what the relationship was between them in Wonka III. They were represented by economic units which are households or what we call patio groups which were a number of circular structures, occasionally a rectangular structure in Wonka III facing into an enclosed space. Sometimes with walls, sometimes just enclosed by other structures or changes in the topography like a steep drop. So each one of these households is represented by one or several structures and some patio areas which we had placed excavations in to collect material that would reflect what was going on in the household which meant that our basic research design was based on characterizing households as units and comparing them. What we didn't do very much of is look at patterning within households or specific households and how they differed from other ones and so on. What we were looking for was large-scale social averages. What we're doing now with this re-analysis project is focusing at a smaller scale looking for patterning within the households or things that make particular households unusual and contrasting to other ones rather than just sort of general representatives of their group in this four-way partition. That means the original design led to a lot of publications but what this means is that there's still a lot of interesting juice to be gotten out of this data that really hasn't been addressed much yet. So when I say we classified by common or elite we did that various different ways. That happened actually before I joined the project in 1983 but you can see the masonry differs. Nice big stones with chinking versus smaller sort of irregular stones with less coursing and no chinking. Surprisingly often you can really make a call on that and the artifacts tended to bear it out. We also looked at the size of the patio's bigger units of more structures probably more elite. The ones located closer to the top of the hill in the center of the site probably more elite and so on. This is what these structures look like. This is actually a really very small one but nevertheless when they were intact they were cylindrical with one door. Usually no windows, almost never any windows and probably had a peaked conical thatched roof. The region we are working in this is the upper Montarro. I hope you can make it out. Anyway, this is the upper part of the Montarro Valley and the Yonah-Marca Valley which is sort of like a lobe off of it a slightly higher lobe off of it. There's a city of Hawcha and there's J54 or Marca which is the site that I'm going to be focusing us in on rather than looking at the region and the comparisons that UMARC was originally designed to do. So here is the site of Marca mapped in purple and superimposed on an elevation map made from old-air photos. It's a little bumpy yet. That's the technical issues I need to work out but you get a general idea of the setting of this site. It's elevated, it's defensible but not as defensible as many of the other sites that we worked at. It's a Wonka III site, an Inca site. The Inca tended to move people out of their most defensible locations down closer to the fields where they were easier to control less able to defend themselves and could better produce for the Inca state. They remained at Marca because perhaps it was close enough and not too defensible. So here you have a view from the side. These horizontal lines here, those are walls and ditches. Now we're looking straight down on it. Some parts of it have been farmed and somewhat disturbed and so some of the late material that we're going to see might come from later farming or other later uses considerably after the conquest. That's something we tried to avoid but impossible to totally roll out. We're going to be looking at J54 equals 7 which is a particular patio where we found some things that were odd. Here we're zooming in again. There's 54 equals 7. And here are excavations going on at 54 equals 7. You get an idea of the setting. This is the valley bottoms and the slopes are a major bread basket for Peru today and were extremely productive in the past. Supported large fairly dense populations. And in fact the first capital of Peru was at Halcha for a few years when the Spanish, the first Spanish capital Peru was at Halcha for a few years when they first took over the area. You can see this is open patio space which has been farmed with the corners and little spaces that were sort of between buildings and so on appeared to be relatively undisturbed. Some were and some weren't. And this structure... Yeah, you can see that. This structure here is what I'm particularly going to talk about. And if you looked closely at the publicity picture for this talk you will have noticed it's a structure that has... Well, you can see some of the interesting things in that structure which we'll get to shortly. So Wonka III and IV and it was originally classified as an elite patio which is probably correct. It's a little small for an elite patio. It was right next to another elite patio. So these may have been subsidiaries or associates of the elite in some way. Not too important for my talk today. Yeah. So one of the things that makes going back to old data interesting is that we can do things today that we couldn't even dream about doing in 1983. So here are all these hand-drawn field notes all geo-referenced and combined in a GIS so that I can start to put together what was happening in a way that we could in our minds perhaps imagine in 1983 but we could never be as literal and complete about it as we are now. We have all sorts of tools now for improving our photos for doing statistical analyses easily and in sort of an exploratory way presenting them very nicely and so on which means that we collected data that was really good now we can make much better use of it than we could at the time. And I look back at our early publications which are literally in typing. They're typed. They're not even in modern fonts. The graphics are all drawn by hand anyway. We can do a lot fancier stuff now and although I think we got a lot of really useful data out of it there's still a lot left to be gained. Right. So taking away all the other stuff just sort of simplifying it down this is the patio that we're talking about or that I'm going to be talking about a 54 equals 7. The patio unit is a household that had one structure definitely part of it. Another structure which this door is a little hypothetical we're not quite sure and we didn't excavate in this one and then this is the patio area. This other structure opens into another space and it's not part of it the one up there. There's another patio household unit located above over here. Another one located below down here. It's sort of the land drops off here to some other ones further down. So this is where presumably one household would have lived. The blue outlines excavation areas which are called ASDs archaeological architectural subdivisions where an ASD could be a structure or it could be an area in a patio. They were further broken down into excavation units which I'm not showing you that level of detail and of course all the straighter within them and the features and so on. Right. For a lot of our analyses the only purpose of that was to pull out good occupation contexts and not include fill and not include later material and so on. I'm going to be talking about this feature here this structure here and here it is just before being excavated after the vegetation has been cleared off. You can see it's a circular structure with a little bit of wall fall inside but most of that's gone in this picture. And here it is after it's been a little bit excavated and right away it was clear that there's something really odd about this structure as you can see. It's got these flat stones ringing the outside. It's not so clear in this picture. They're best defined in this half which is opposite the doorway right here but there are some that continue around and it was probably a complete ring all the way around. Some of the stones may have been picked up with the wall fall before it became clear what was going on but these are not wall fall stones. They tend to be fairly large. They're relatively flat. They're lying horizontally on a surface and creating like a pavement around the outside edge of the structure. This from Umarp's original research design point of view was not good because it's not a typical household that's going to produce the kind of typical representative data that we wanted and so Elspietta Zakentur here who was in charge of the excavations was under a lot of pressure justifiably so to rip through there get our data out as fast as possible and not be slowed down by stuff that was irrelevant to the research design. Which is now of course what I'm most interested in and why I'm really I'm glad that she did the good field work that she did but I'm frustrated that she had to do it so fast with such quick casual sketches and so on we can recover a lot but it would be nice if we had been focusing on these kinds of things at the time on the other hand we wouldn't have gotten the data we needed for our basic research design so right you have to live with what you've got. So reconstructing from photos, various field drawings and the field notes I can give you a picture like this of this structure so outside we have standard PERCA limestone PERCA is a local word for this two-faced limestone rock construction this is just a schematic but the width is as shown in the field drawings. The stones most of them lying around the bottom are limestone the same common material that was used for building but a bunch of them are fillite which is a nice dense smooth fine grain stone which you could use for a working surface or grinding although they're not obviously grinding stones it's not entirely clear what the fillite slabs were for but they like them they put them in burials sometimes I'm guessing they were surfaces to do things prepare food on, do craft work on and so on. There are also a number of grinding stones that is large pieces of shaped grind equipment for grinding and the smaller pieces of the similar material that you use on top of them as monos or handstones among those rocks and there were a number of burning features located inside right next to the doorway which you might do if you just wanted to smoke to go out the door but on the other hand you might it's not obvious that that's there are various possible interpretations of why you would have fires right by the doorway I'm imagining walking in this doorway into a fairly dark room with a fire burning on either side of the entryway would have been kind of cool to put a positive spin on it respectful or inspiring or something perhaps now I want to show you a photo we don't have as many photos as I would like of this because unfortunately precisely this structure is the one that was documented with a roll of film that was destroyed in the field so I've got a few sort of casual photos that people took on their personal rolls some of the earliest photos in black and white and then the next roll but the really key stuff of all these complicated features all gone unfortunately but nevertheless I do have some views looking in the direction of that arrow there and here's what we found after a little bit of soil was removed around this ring of stones you've got a nice Inca Urpu or Reboloid rim there's a lot of Inca, local Inca and even some state Inca pottery in this structure so it was clearly occupied either in the late intermediate period under the Inca or shortly thereafter when they were still using the same stuff and unfortunately the way burials are often found is someone goes through the top of the cranium with their trowel or their pick so this is modern damage that's not going to be true for everything we see so our structure with the circle of stones with the ring of stones turned out to have a bunch of burials in it that's eight individuals one cluster of five with two adult males, two adult females and an adolescent of undetermined sex another adult male with an infant on his chest a neonate or a small infant on his chest and another adult male and although the way these are drawn it looks like they could be three separate burial events I think they were at most two and perhaps just one I'll show you some photos and try to convince you of that so Umarp excavated 43 primary burials by which I mean burial events some of which had multiple individuals in them 25 of them more than half have only one person another quarter more or less have two or three people big burials with more than three are rare so we only have one with four, one with five one with seven and if we count these all together one with eight none of them are in Wonka too these big burials the indigenous chieftain they all come in either under the Inca or under the Spanish at the very end of the Inca period if you think about that the Inca period is not very long the late horizon is not very long so people could have been living under the Inca the Spanish arrive things happen they bury their dead in what still looks like an Inca household so that's always been a little bit of a problem separating out that contact time we don't we can't recognize Wonka 4 until we actually people have been there long enough using European stuff to start leaving it in their deposits so it's possible that these large burials are are only after the Spanish arrived or they may have started doing them under the Inca either way foreign conquerors come in and you start seeing large burials it's not a good sign right there so here's the beginning of that larger cluster the same two rocks we saw before several three of the burials are outside that ring and two of them are underneath the rocks the rocks are clearly on top of part of this large cluster of burials and then the other burials are even further under the rocks so here's the rocks have all been removed it's all been cleaned off and you can see sort of schematic representations of the different burials these are so tightly packed together they're articulated they're complete but they must have been bundled really tightly which is fairly typical in Andean burials and packed together in a very small space they're not all oriented in the same direction but they're all parallel they're sort of partly on top of each other I think there's very little doubt that this is one event these people are all put in there at one time and the stones are put right on top of them a little bit of soil but basically right on top of them these appeared at the time at the time we treated them as a single burial it seems like the pit is continuous although the stratigraphy and cuts and so on are not clear in this environment well all right how are they treated a bunch of them had pot sherds on their head which is something that Wonka did even in earlier period so there's the adolescent has sherds on his head and the male and the infant on top of the male's chest have sherds on the head what does that mean I don't know there's also burial out in the patio separate from this structure but in the same patio unit that has sherds on its head I'll show you later another thing was buried with one of these individuals was there's another one of those fillite slabs just poking out and it turned out that that was on top of an intact vessel with these bodies were a number of metal objects which I will show you here a bronze pin very typical late horizon Inka a more local style of pin that's the head of the pin it's silver it would have had a long shaft which we didn't find and a fragment of a cutting tool to me this is pretty typical excuse me pretty typical Wonka III stuff it's nice but it's nothing spectacular in addition across the building from the burials just in that area of stones were found a bunch of fragments of silver discs not these but that's what they would have looked like so here's those other three burials the ones that are apart from an angle you can see how they're really basically in contact here their tail end to tail end partly on top of each other the feet of the lower one are articulated it's hard to imagine that happening by sheer chance that they weren't put in there at the same time it's remotely possible but I think these two adults and the infant on the chest of the one probably went in there as a unit so it's at least as a burial of three I suspect it's a burial of eight all at once with the rocks put on top but that's a little bit less solid so who were these people? we have a few very limited clues more physical analysis would be great if we ever had the chance so two individuals have cranial deformation unfortunately this one you can see is not in very good shape I don't have a photo of it but according to the notes that were taken at the time by Marilyn Norconk who did the biological the physical anthropological analysis the cranial deformation is similar and there's the one that's intact you can see how it's been sort of squashed and pushed back this is something that is found in about half of wonka adults actually there are two varieties of cranial deformation the other half don't have any the fact that we have a slightly older female who has the same deformation as an adult but younger male suggests maybe offspring treated in the same way I don't, I don't want to push that one but they're similar in that way then there are wormyan bones used to be called inka bones because they're so, they're originally recognized among Andean populations so we have a number of individuals with wormyan bones the two adults over there one of the adults in the bulk burial or the larger burial and the individual was buried out in the patio so there are wormyan bones there are extra bones around in the back of the cranium you can see between the parietals and occipital temperals right, anyway need to go back and check that I'm not a biological anthropologist anyway about 16% of wonka adults have these bones of the examples that we have four of the nine are from this one patio we don't know that they're genetic but it's kind of tempting to think that this suggests that these are relatives so now here the potchards have been removed from the head of this adult and I want to show you some interesting things about this cranium remember it was under, it was well protected under solid pottery here's a side view there's a top view if we have anyone who's ever taken a forensic anthro class you will shiver at what you're looking at there those are not wounds, those are not injuries from someone probing with a probe it was under sherds this is pre-burial damage and you see a bunch of sort of almost round oval but almost round holes one that's sort of more elongated and if we look from the inside there they are if we zoom in these are classic entry wounds on green bone so what could make wounds like that? a bunch of them from different directions on the same person that can make that kind of wound that's a halberd, a 16th century weapon and here are Pizarro and his men in early 20th century representation and they've all got halberds and in fact there's lots of other evidence that they used halberds including even Juan Manpoma who was an eye witness to the early Spanish occupation and he routinely showed Spaniards in this case, Almagro and Pizarro with halberds these ones are shown a little bit wider and a little bit shorter some halberds have sort of a point some are a little bit more like a dagger on top a long wide dagger I'm not sure which to take more literally anyway something with a rounder point or perhaps the very tip of one of those could have made the more round holes the elongated hole could have been made in various ways with similar instruments so I'm going to say going this oh yes before I get to this that person was undoubtedly killed with a Spanish weapon there's no indigenous weapon that would be that small and make puncture marks like that and cause of death right don't have to defend that there's another burial out in the patio another male 20 to 35 years old sort of young prime age there he is with two large pot bases over his head and here you can see one of those there are two fillite slabs here and you can see it's a nice fine grained stone sometimes put in burials and I'd like you to focus on that area right there because these this picture in the next one line up and those are pre deposition as well there's no way those holes got there before after those pot sherds are put on and the pot sherds are in situ this was not recognized in the physical anthropological analysis that was done at the time because in battle days the person who is looking at the bones didn't have easy access to field photos and stuff which hadn't been developed yet wasn't perhaps looking very closely at the field notes so we don't have an explanation of this other than the photos but those those holes are there pre burial there's a view of them they're not as obvious as the other ones as the other individual there's a view from the inside looking through the foramen magnum and this is not a classic these are not classic puncture wounds on the other hand I'm not sure they're not and I'm not sure how that sort of damage would have gotten there between the person's death and their burial it's a little hard to interpret so we don't I don't know exactly whether this is the cause of death and whether it was similar or not so now what about all the artifacts that tell us what was going on at the time I could subject you to lots and lots of these pretty pictures with pie charts that would take me hours to explain so I won't instead I'm just going to give you sort of this the boiled down interpretations first of all we can do some dating with the artifacts that we found there's a lot of European animal bone in the in this this patio unit and especially in the structure so one of the highest densities of horse in any of the ASD's was excavated or the highest excuse me as as a percentage of all the bone high density of pig pretty high density of sheep so this is clearly occupied well into the or used for something well into the Spanish colonial period there are also some artifacts a horseshoe in good occupation otherwise good occupation context and in a poor context sort of above a glass marble and then some colonial seren or a colonial ceramic sherd or perhaps somewhat later than colonial ceramic sherd and some beer bottle glass not so good in disturbed deposits out in the patio so definitely goes into the historic period which is not surprising given that we know that at least one of the people was killed after the Spanish arrived so what don't we have very much of we don't have a high density of sherds relatively speaking this is it's not extreme it's at the very low end of the distribution of how much pottery we would find in such a place by density that's kind of odd we've got a low density of lithic blades long skinny flakes and a low density of flakes that are not blades which would have been both made and made there for use and used for a whole variety of cutting cutting purposes and the lithic analyst Glenn Russell who looked at the stuff didn't particularly remark on the overall densities in this way but he used a ubiquity measure and he pointed out that the kinds of tools that you make out of flakes knives, scrapers, drills and so on were extremely rare in this particular patio it was an outlier in that respect so a lot of the things you'd expect in a normal occupation are scarce there they're not absent but there's not so much of them so what is there instead among the botanical remains in my very quick analysis I'm sorry Christine I haven't done as much as I should with this yet a lot of the stuff looks pretty typical but there's a lot of burned wood in this one exterior patio unit and in fact there's a lot of other burned plant material I need to lump that together but it looks like there's a big fire somewhere and a bunch of stuff got dumped in that area not totally unusual or not unprecedented but not common what else do we find if we look at the lithics and some of these things were not noticed before because no one was looking for or variation at this small scale but in four of these units including the or four of these ASTs including the structure there's an unusual amount of hematite hematite is an iron mineral it's dense, heavy and sometimes occurs in little balls and in fact in Elgbietta's field notes she describes finding a funny round rock which was apparently one of these hematite balls that caught the attention of an excavator certainly would have caught the attention of people who lived this site what they did with them or why they cared about them I don't know but they were weird little things and there were a lot of them in this patio even more interesting quartz crystals they're a very high density quartz crystals in three of the ASTs, three separate units this one, this one and the structure in this site and in this patio more so than we found anywhere else in fact I think if I look only at the ring of stones here if I exclude the central area which I can because Elgbietta wisely excavated them separately I believe, I haven't done this yet but I believe we'll find that the density in the ring of stones is by far the highest anywhere but at the moment it's diluted a little bit by including the occupation deposits in the middle so lots of quartz crystals what do people think about quartz crystals? we'll just ask someone who lives in Marin, right? they surely meant something exactly what I... yeah there's going to be a lot of that I'm afraid that's the thing about Ritual so wait a minute, did I have something else there? no alright so what else do we find in their ceramics? even more interesting first of all there's a relatively large number of bowl fragments in these two patio ASTs not outlandishly only 20% only the top 20% so maybe that means something maybe it doesn't but it kind of goes with some of the other things I'm going to be pointing out there's a high density of lids lids are not common ceramic pot lids are not common in this assemblage but we have a number of them from this site and given the volumes that we excavated the density is high so something that was lided or something that was in lided vessels was important here a number of miniatures as well miniatures are also uncommon miniatures, ceramic vessels what do they mean? I don't know but they're odd and we've got a bunch of them well, two of them but that's given them out we excavated that's a high density for these small samples a number of figurines also unusual and an overwhelming density of ceramic spoon fragments from not inside this structure here but from out here in the unit that had the the one buried guy with the pots on his head this is this greater than by far than any other unit in the project spoon fragments spoon fragments are rare enough that they're not even mentioned in the ceramic well well they're mentioned but they're never discussed or illustrated in this dissertation that resulted from the ceramics from this this project so they're unusual the best I can show you is a warpa style spoon this is from not too far away and a little bit earlier but well a lot earlier but it's just the similar kind of thing I never even saw a Wonka ceramic spoon so I'm assuming that they look about the same but these are found they're found in many places in the Andes often associated with the the Middle Horizon earlier time period they're uncommon they're not extremely rare but they're not common so they're probably not for an ordinary use these are not soup spoons they're chunky things they're solid they're not light and delicate long skinny handles they're chunky but you almost always see them broken I personally don't believe I've ever seen an intact example of a ceramic spoon I've seen a bunch of fragments but how did I mean they shouldn't break so what on earth are they doing with these things having been inspired by a talk that Kathy Costin just gave at the the Phoebe Hearst Museum about drug use early in an earlier time period I'm going to go way out on a limb and make an analogy between these and the muscle shells in an ethnographic film where a modern curandero pours a potion something like ayahuasca into this little muscle shell and tips it into his nose I'm not going to make say that it's necessarily exactly that but I would not be surprised if these spoons were used for some sort of potion taking activity and then perhaps they were they're richly broken swig your wine and you throw glasses into the fireplace maybe something similar this notice wild speculation but I don't think it's totally out of the question especially when they're found in weird context like a whole bunch of them with the burial so what if we got here we have at least one adult male who's killed with a Spanish weapon buried with an infant on his chest sherds on both of their heads probably about the same time another adult male was buried two other men two other women or two women and adolescent all probably buried I would argue at the same time another adult male who knows when buried out in the patio with cranial damage and pots on his head as well maybe some hints that their relatives or connected to each other in some way through the wormy and bones and the cranial deformation maybe this practice of large multiple burials is something that appeared either with the Inca or certainly it was happening by the time the Spanish were there maybe it has to do with external domination maybe specifically the Spanish or maybe both the once the burials were in there they put this ring of stones down on top of them the stratigraphy is not extremely clear but it doesn't look to me like they're intrusive it looks like the stones are put on top of the burials unfortunately what I can't tell you is whether they're intrusive into the occupation deposits in the household or whether those occupation deposits continued to accumulate after the ring was there I'd love to be able to pull that apart but it looks like it's not going to be possible with the data some sort of activities were going on that may or may not have been associated with this small fires inside the doorway quartz crystals and hematite chunks and balls inside and outside two little ceramic vessels figurine and one definite one and possibly two other ones some bowls maybe more than usual something that came in a vessels with lids maybe something that you put in a spoon lots of ceramic spoons in that one burial these things all have to do with one pattern of activity or several different ones multiple events unfortunately I don't think I'm going to be able to tell you that but some something or some number of odd things were happening there is relatively little residential activity there maybe because they were doing these other things maybe because that truncated the occupation or because people did different things there or this was a space that had acquired some other meanings like something like that perhaps and there's a lot of historical material there which suggests either that that these events happened well after the Spanish had arrived in a lot of stuff a lot of European stuff have been accumulating or it happened shortly after the Spanish arrived in the area continued to be used afterwards either one is intriguing and either one has slightly different interpretations of what the events were that led to all these people dying and being buried all at once but it's not very flattering to the Spanish in any case so to leave on a sort of a final note I would suggest to what we're looking at here is the development of some new ways of grieving in the face of a new kind of really awful violence and abuse so that's where I'd like to leave you and I'd like to give thanks to the members of the you mark original you mark project and those are continuing to do work with the material and even the students who worked in Christine's analysis class and started working with a lot of the state at a fine level so thank you any questions thoughts yeah great talk so you're talking about the archive now the materials themselves where are they actually house some samples were exported and are here and will be stored here but the bulk of the material remained in Halcha some of it went to Lima where God knows what's happened to it um yeah it was kind of spotting in terms of material and what you got is a lot of the good archival the field notes and the area of account right what you what you want to do right yeah all the surroundings all the Olympics yeah right a bunch of the human bone yeah all the figurines all that's in Halcha yeah yeah okay yes make up you say how was it that structure where the common we classify as as elite and based on the stuff that was found in there that's that's reasonable although because it's aberrant um just to those really apply as I don't know was it no actually the structure is relatively typical I mean I was looking at that and thinking man it's that's a big space but actually I went and measured a bunch of the other ones and it's it's in the normal ballpark it could very well have been built as a regular residence and then repurposed at some point that's an interesting question I don't know that would be a lot of shots to hit one person and they didn't have shotguns I don't believe or they didn't use fine shot that's an interesting question I hadn't considered that no don't know who else yeah mostly more than during that process the that would have to that would make some sense in that we have some burials that are mostly primary and have one or two clearly secondary bunches of bones of another individual in there um none of these fit that category all of these individuals are well articulated I mean the excavations were very rushed the soil is hard and so on so they're not beautiful pictures but the bodies were all quite articulated and complete so if they did that if they reburied someone he was still so complete that his job was enclosed right and his head was attached to his cervical vertebrae and so on so it would have had to have been a fairly hasty reburial that's not impossible because we know the Inca like to parade their mummies around and they had beliefs about the the bodies of the dead but there's no evidence to suggest that it's a secondary burial and it's otherwise the same as as other burials the position is similar the goods are similar and so on so I think that's it's possible but doesn't strike me as really likely yeah right it's not that it's so cold but it's also damp and the soil is dense and so those bodies fairly quickly but how quickly I can tell you but fairly quickly would have been well stuck into the ground so you wouldn't it wouldn't be like they were in sand or loose in a cave where you could sort of push them around so I wouldn't say that's impossible but actually if we go back and I should find that slide but if we go back and look at the the feet actually looked quite good and they were under the the pelvis of the other individual so that's not a problem with the feet actually the fact that the the foot bones are all articulated suggests that there wasn't a lot of disturbance although you're right if someone dug in there six months or a year later it may have been possible to do that without disturbing the other body I doubt that it would have been pushed much so again I can't I can't rule that out but I would suspect probably not this yeah we could look I'd like to be able to look in detail where the stones are to see what would have had to be lifted and put it down and see if we could see any difference but unfortunately we don't have the photos and so doing something that refined is going to be tough that's one problem with going back to old data especially data that wasn't collected for this kind of purpose someone else here yes except exactly so they're the burials themselves are pretty typical the potchards on the head the fillite slabs the occasional vessel the occasional metal object the positions that's all pretty normal what's not normal is having a whole bunch of them together like that by far as I showed you by far the most common is one less common is two once in a while you find one with three so I think those probably reflect sort of normal patterns of people dying or the people got sick in the household or there was an accident or something but eight all at once is that's that's what's unusual the treatment of the burials themselves is not so unusual what also what's unusual is putting the stones on top and all this other stuff with spoons and crystals and hematite and that's not usual on the other hand we were never looking for it before so now I need to go back and look at other burials especially other large ones and see if there's some parallels but at least the ring of stones is unique both are found and the inside is usually in that area close to the wall maybe because that's where there's less traffic and you're less likely to damage the bodies or to walk on your ancestors or also perhaps because that's often where the bedrock is lower on one side of the other so that's the place where it's easier to dig down and and make a cavity big enough to put bodies in yeah they're not associated with the burial obviously maybe they are in some way but they they're sort of scattered bones that you might get from the occasional chunk of meat rather than you know sacrificing animal or something like that they're from occupation deposits so it's not they're not all just lying on top although there's always some mixing and it's possible if stuff was left there's got there somehow after the fact it could have gotten mixed in but it's a fair amount it's unusually large amount so it's hard to say exactly what that means but I would guess it probably means people somewhere in the media vicinity we're eating European animals actually let me ask a question does anyone have any thoughts about what this might all mean I mean what sort of rituals one would do with these things or I've been a little reluctant to go too far out on a limb yeah that would be yeah the the stones the fillite slabs or even the ring of stones would be a great place to put things we did think about that I can easily imagine something like that but much more than something like that I it's hard to say yeah I think we were trying to avoid historical context in this project nevertheless we kept hitting them and and we are learning something about historical periods in spite of ourselves because of this it would be another project to go back and look at the early archaeology the early colonial period might be kind of a depressing one if you're excavating an indigenous context anyone else thank you