Pre-Inca cultures acquired Amazonian parrots hundreds of miles away to use feathers to decorate the dead, new analysis reveals

About 1,000 years ago, pre-Inca cultures obtained wild parrots from the Amazon rainforest hundreds of miles away and captured them in what is now the coastal region of Peru. All this was done to give people access to the birds’ bright plumage, a “noble symbol of status,” a new study has found.

Researchers discovered some of these feathers about 20 years ago in a 1,000-year-old tomb. Now, a new analysis reveals “the complete journey of these feathers,” including where the birds came from, what they ate, and what routes live birds likely took before being traded to the Ixuma, a pre-Incan society that flourished from around 1000 AD to 1470.

Although it has long been known that the Inca and other pre-Hispanic cultures traded and valued parrot feathers, this study is one of the first to show that “long before the Inca Empire, the Yuxuma culture participated in a sophisticated trade network that spanned the Andes Mountains,” the authors said in their study.

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Researchers first discovered the burial in 2005 using ground-penetrating radar, and subsequent excavations revealed two large stone-walled tombs near the Pachacamac Temple, 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Lima. In one of Ishma’s two tombs, archaeologists discovered brightly colored parrot feather ornaments that had been preserved for centuries.

Now, an international team of researchers has analyzed the DNA and chemical composition of the feathers and concluded that the feathers came from live Amazonian parrots that were transported and possibly traded across the mountains before being reared on the Peruvian coast. Their new study was published Tuesday (March 10) in the journal Nature Communications.

“Our study proves that centuries before the Incas, societies such as the Yuxuma and Chimu already managed sophisticated, organized long-distance trade networks,” study co-author Izumi Shimada, professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University and co-director of the Pachacamac Archeology Project, which first discovered the tombs, told Live Science in an email. “They have deep ecological knowledge and have negotiated trade agreements that connect the Amazon and the coastal desert, which allows these states to [were] More interconnected. ”

The discovery shows how much effort these societies put into what they considered prestigious items. At Pachacamac, these feathers were found decorating false heads (cloths stuffed with reeds and other plants) attached to the funerary bundles of 34 dead people decorated with small cinnabar masks, suggesting that the feathers were used for ritual activities such as burials.

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A view of the Pachacamac Temple (or Painted Temple) near Lima, Peru, where the feathers were discovered.

One of 34 bundles of grave goods with feather decorations found in one of the graves.

Another funerary bundle with preserved parrot feathers.

Another view of one of the intact tombs found near Pachacamac Temple.

However, it appears that the captured birds were not living in the temple.

“Our study actually suggests that large-scale rearing of these captive birds may have taken place not at Pachacamac itself (we found no parrot skeletons, eggshells, or traces of breeders), but perhaps further north in the Chimu Empire, which traded harvested feathers with Yuxuma to the south,” study lead author George Oler, a researcher at the Australian National University, told Live Science in an email. The proposed Chim breeding grounds are based on a computer model in a new paper, he added.

sacred place

The Pachacamac temple and its oracle served as the center of the Ixuma society that ruled the valley around Lima before the Inca conquest around 1470. “Due to Pachacamac’s long-standing and widespread reputation, elites from ancient Peru’s diverse cultures sought the privilege of being buried near the temple,” Shimada said. “The site is believed to have contained tens of thousands of burials of elites from various cultures and regions.”

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After the Spanish conquest in 1533, looters ransacked Pachacamac’s tombs for centuries, stealing and destroying countless Ishma artifacts. By the early 2000s, when the Pachacamac Archeology Project began work, many researchers believed that there were no intact elite tombs left next to the temple – so the discovery of the two tombs was an “unusual event,” the researchers wrote in their study.

feather quest

During their investigation, the researchers examined the mitochondrial DNA of 25 feathers found in the grave and determined that the ornaments on the funeral bundle belonged to at least four species of tropical parrots: the scarlet macaw (Ara macao), the red and green macaw (Ara chromropterus), the blue and yellow macaw (Ara ararauna), and the Kona Amazon (Amazona farinosa). All these birds live in lowland tropical forests east of the Andes, not on the coast of Peru.

These birds live hundreds of miles from Ixuma, suggesting that societies traded with other birds to obtain them.

“The fact that it ended up being over 500km [310 miles] “On the other side of South America’s highest mountain range, they are evidence of human intervention. They do not naturally fly over the Andes,” Ola said in a statement.

Analysis of feather isotopes (variations of elements with different numbers of neutrons in the nucleus) reveals the birds’ diet.

Unlike the diets of modern wild parrots, which are rich in fruits and seeds, Pachacamac’s ancient plumage shows that it included a diet rich in plants such as corn and food associated with coastal agriculture, probably enriched by seabird feces.

“The fact that they were feeding along the coast proves that the birds were transported alive somewhere along the coast and kept there long enough to molt and grow new feathers with the isotopic signatures we detected,” Oler told Live Science via email.

Macaw plumage also showed higher genetic diversity in DNA, unlike the lower diversity expected from small captive breeding colonies. This suggests that local breeding occurred near Pachacamac, with repeated supplies of birds from Amazonian populations and migration through intermountain trade routes.

“While it may be tempting to think of them as pets, archaeological evidence suggests they were kept primarily for their feathers, which were a valuable luxury item used in elite tunics, headdresses and funeral bundles,” Oler said.

Find a route across the Andes

To understand how these birds migrated through the Andes, the researchers turned to computational models. They considered ancient terrain, river systems, and ocean conditions and performed a “least cost” route analysis to determine which route would require the least amount of energy for human caravans.

A more efficient route suggested two possible corridors. One route is through a northern network linked to the coastal region of the Chimu Empire, and the other is through a central Andean corridor linking the coast with the eastern lowlands.

“The recommended optimal path actually makes sense and is in good agreement with historical and archaeological evidence,” Oler said.

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