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).
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.
Contact between the Old World and the New World in the year 1492 forever changed the course of history. Peoples and societies on both sides of this exchange were forever transformed, both culturally and biologically. Much scientific and archaeological study has been directed to understanding the consequences of culture contact in North America, but very little is known regarding the effects of contact in Peru – one of the centers of Spanish colonization of the Americas, and where a key chapter in this period of human history unfolded. The Lambayeque Valley on the desert north coast of Peru was a center of pre-Hispanic civilizations for 2,500 years before the Spanish arrival. Following conquest, Lambayeque remained an important region. Between 2004-6, the Lambayeque Valley Biohistory Project initiated the bioarchaeological study of the postcontact Andes in the northwest corner of the valley at the ruins of a church in the desert town of Mórrope. Analysis of burials showed that the native population of Muchik peoples experienced widespread declines in health and well-being – which is the general expectation for Native Americans in the historic Americas. Simultaneously, the local people preserved ancient Muchik burial rituals by hybridizing with Catholic rites. Genetic analyses showed that as pre-Hispanic politics, group identities, and social organization fell apart, the people of Mórrope participated in a reformulation of social and marriage networks; contact literally shaped a hybrid gene pool. But Mórrope was just one community – was their biological and cultural responses to conquest typical to the process that literally turned everyone’s lives and society upside down? To address this key question, the Lambayeque Valley Biohistory Project assembled an international and multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and physical anthropologist from 2010-12 to excavate and analyze the ruins of two abandoned chapel ruins, nearly 500 human skeletons, and the buried town itself in Eten, Lambayeque, Peru (A.D. 1532-1760). This work tested two hypotheses by integrating burial patterns, bioarchaeology, dental anthropology, zooarchaeology, paleobotany, archaeogenetics, ceramic analysis, and architectural studies – each a uniquely powerful form of evidence about the human past, but are rarely brought together in a single project. First, it was hypothesized that even within the relatively small Lambayeque Valley region, the health of the people in Eten would be better than their neighbors in Mórrope – due to the resource-rich ecology of seaside Eten. Second, cultural and biological hybridization were hypothesized to have been present in Eten as a valley-wide cultural response to conquest. The results show the Muchik Eten population bore minimal health stress. Indeed, ecology played a role, but a stable local economy also was key. Analysis of food remains from trash pits amid ruins revealed locals maintained a diverse subsistence economy featuring intense consumption of marine foods, meat, and fruit. Public architecture in the town was of a high quality, and while the people of Eten appeared self-sufficient producing traditional ceramics on the household level, they were also participating in a trade network that brought in ceramic goods produced in Panama and even China. Burials in Eten showed no evidence of cultural hybridization and were almost universally Catholic in style. This suggests that unlike Mórrope, the Muchik people of Eten underwent ‘successful’ conversion, and may be a refection of a Catholic Muchik subculture in the region. Microevolutionary signatures of biological hybridization was detected in variations of inherited tooth size; disintegration of pre-Hispanic mating networks in tandem with sociopolitical breakdown was not limited to Mórrope, but indeed likely involved the entire valley. Culture contact is often envisioned as a process with predestined consequences (i.e., increasing native health stress, population extinction, and destruction of native culture). In Eten, people found ways to adapt to or buffer against some of the most detrimental and common biological effects of contact; declining native health was not an inevitable outcome of contact. At the same time, the people found themselves negotiating a radically new cultural reality that emerged from uniquely local entanglements with the Colonial world; new behaviors and identities appear to have contributed to regional microevolutionary transformation of the local gene pool, and not by epidemic disease-induced demographic collapse. This reconstruction is built from many lines of independent but complementary lines of evidence. It contributes data and conceptual perspectives to regional and global studies of culture contact. The configuration of method and theory advance bioarchaeology and mortuary analysis in general, and within Peruvian archaeology specifically. It also sets multiple foundations for reconstructing linkages between health and cultural change that can better inform our understandings of how culture and economy shapes health in the past, present, and future. Ultimately, this project provides a more complete understanding of one of the most significant biocultural transitions over the last 10,000 years of human history, underscoring the complexity and unique pathways of culture contact in the Americas.
