Mummies can provide valuable information about the lives and deaths of people from early cultures. This is also the case with three mummies from the Andean region that are around a thousand years old. Archaeologists have now found using computed tomography that two of those dead, both men, were victims of brutal violence: one of them suffered multiple fractures of the skull from a blow and was then stabbed, the second was beaten to death. Only the third female mummy showed no signs of violence.
There are mummies not only from ancient Egypt, but also from the South American Andes region. Some early cultures, such as the Chinchorro, intentionally prepared and buried their dead so that they became mummies. The Incas, on the other hand, did not use elaborate mummification techniques, but brought selected young people to high mountain peaks as human sacrifices, where they were killed and mummified in the dry cold.
Because of the dry climate prevailing in the Andes, however, many dead from other pre-Columbian cultures were not decomposed, but mummified in a natural way. Because the body tissues and soft tissues of mummies are dried but largely intact, they can provide far more information about the life and death of the dead than mere bones.
Three pre-Columbian mummies in CT
Anna-Maria Begerock from the Center for Mummy Research in Madrid and her colleagues have now also taken this opportunity. For their study, they subjected three pre-Columbian mummies from Peru and Chile to a virtual autopsy using high-resolution computed tomography. The first mummy kept in Marburg today comes from a 1,000-year-old grave in northern Chile. The deceased belonged to the Arica culture and was buried in a crouched position, as was customary at the time. Grave goods indicate that the man was a fisherman during his lifetime. "There is no evidence that this man was a warrior or was buried in connection with a ritual," the archaeologists report.
The other two mummies - a man and a woman - were buried in southwestern Peru and are now part of a collection in Délémont, Switzerland. Both dead lay stretched out and on their backs in the grave, in a departure from the squatting position customary in pre-Columbian cultures. The mummies wore clothing made from llama or alpaca hair and the fur of vizchachas – chinchilla-like rodents. The male mummy dates from around 950, the female is almost 300 years younger. For all three mummies, the cause of death and their age and health at the time of death were unknown. The team has now examined this with their virtual autopsy.
death by brute force
The CT scans revealed: Both men died in extremely brutal circumstances and as a result of excessive force. In the case of the Marburg mummy - a man who was only 20 to 25 years old at the time of death - the cause of death was an attack by one or two perpetrators. The first attacker hit the victim with full force, first in the face and then on the head, as evidenced by fractures in various parts of the skull. "Then a second attacker stabbed the victim in the upper back," the archaeologists report. The stab from the slender, dagger-like weapon penetrated the lungs and may have lacerated the aorta as well. "Due to the massive loss of blood, the Marburg man must have lost consciousness within a few seconds. He died without any defensive reaction," the team said.
The life and death of the second male mummy were even more marked by violence: numerous traces of half-healed, old injuries show that this 40 to 60-year-old man was repeatedly the victim of brutal beatings before he died. He suffered multiple fractures in his ribs and skull, and his face was severely disfigured from injuries. "That speaks for recurring trauma," the archaeologists say. The cause of death of this man is also clearly due to violence: a violent blow to the left temple broke his skull. This or a second blow could also have been so powerful that it fractured the cervical vertebrae. "The clear displacement of the two vertebral bodies from C3/C4 is fatal in itself and resulted in immediate death," report Begerock and her colleagues. In contrast, the female mummy was the only one showing no injuries or other signs of a violent death.
Level of Violence in Ancient Cultures Revealed
According to the research team, these results confirm that there was also plenty of violence in the Andean region around a thousand years ago. Previous studies of skeletons from this time and area had already shown that on average 21 percent of the male dead bore marks of violence. However, because not all injuries to the bones show up, only the mummies give a more complete picture. "Some of the injuries that we found on the mummies would not have been visible if we only had the bones from these dead people," says co-author Andreas Nerlich from the Munich Clinic in Bogenhausen. "Modern CT scans with the possibility of 3D reconstructions give us unique insights into the body."
Source: Frontiers in Medicine, doi: 10.3389/fmed.2022.962793)