Archaeologists find oldest decapitated skull in South American hunter-gatherer mortuary ritual

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Skull found in Lapa do Santo, East Brazil could have been buried 9,000 years ago

The head of the oldest decapitation ever found in the New World was pulled and twisted after being partially cut off, according to experts from the University of Dundee’s Centre for Anatomy and Human identification who analysed the South American find.

Found with its hands covering its face in a pose described as “mysterious” by anthropologists, the remains, discovered at the Lapa do Santo site in eastern Brazil, have been dated to 9,000 years ago. The rest of the skeleton remains missing.

Professor Sue Black, the Director of the centre, compared the hunter-gatherer remains to a modern-day case of beheading. “We were the forensic team that identified the manner in which the decapitation most likely occurred,” she says.

“Examining the skull, we saw fractures consistent with hyperextension of the head and rotation. There would also have been cutting but the fracturing of the neck bones indicated a violence to the region.”

The next oldest known decapitation in South America occurred 6,000 years later in Peru. Historians previously believed hunter-gatherers possessed few tools capable of assisting such a gruesome act.

Archaeologists have ruled out the possibility of the head being used as a trophy. Signature isotopes in the man’s bones suggest he was a local rather than an outsider or rival, leading to speculation that the arrangement of his hands indicated a form of symbolic ritual.

André Strauss, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, slowly uncovered the disembodied skull and hands, partially crushed as a result of being buried for thousands of years.

“The result from the strontium isotope analysis is compatible with a scenario in which the ritualised decapitation was not a violent act against the enemy but instead part of a broader set of mortuary rituals involving a strong component of manipulation of the body,” he said, writing as a co-author on the report.

“The careful arrangement of the hands over the face is compatible with an important public display component in the ritual that could have worked to enhance social cohesion within the community.

“This ritualised burial attests to the early sophistication of mortuary rituals among hunter-gatherers in the Americas.

“In the apparent absence of wealth goods or elaborate architecture, Lagoa Santa’s inhabitants seemed to be using the human body to reify and express their cosmological principles concerning death.”

• The paper has published in the PLOS-ONE Journal.

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/archaeology/art537837-oldest-decapitated-skull-east-brazil-mortuary-ritual