NSF Award
1026169
European contact and conquest in the Americas initiated a significant biological and cultural transformation that indelibly shaped modern peoples and societies. While South America was a center of this phenomenon, it has received the least scientific study. Bioarchaeological research of human skeletons and their archaeological settings is now poised to advance our understanding of culture contact and conquest by interlinking biological, social, economic, and cultural perspectives of the human past. The researchers are completing excavation and analyses of the ruins of the colonial town of Eten, Lambayeque Valley, Peru, to provide unique perspectives of the question of contact and conquest. Human skeletal remains, burial rituals, and the archaeological study of the colonial town itself are utilized in the test of two hypotheses. First, the health of the local Muchik people (measured by skeletal forms of acute and chronic childhood stress, adult disease, and demographic indicators), long presumed to decline following conquest, did not suffer at Eten. Resource-rich microenvironments around Eten and a strong local economy promoted better health outcomes due to stable and sufficient nutrition (reconstructed from studies of oral health, stable isotope analysis of bone, dental microwear, zooarchaeology, and paleobotany). Second, native Muchik society did not collapse, but transformed to reshape Muchik culture and biology. Burial in Eten reflects an ideologically powerful compromise between Spanish and Muchik religions, forming hybrid rituals. At the same time, new political interactions among the Muchik altered their mate exchange networks and biological hybridization (measured via mtDNA and dental trait variation). <br/><br/>The project produces a holistic and humanized reconstruction life and death in colonial Peru to address global questions about culture contact and colonialism. It promotes problem-based and theoretically driven investigations of burials, their contents, and archaeological settings. It furnishes data to be used in a site museum, contributes to a modern Muchik cultural revitalization, and has multiple educational impacts spanning the Peruvian public and anthropological interests alike as we develop new scientific perspectives regarding how Native Americans actively responded and adapted to European conquest in the Western Hemisphere.
