Mountains, Mythic History, and Molecular Archaeology in the Peruvian Andes

About this event

Public lecture by Matthew C. Velasco, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

For ancient inhabitants of the Andes mountains of Peru, mountains were both places of worship and powerful entities in their own right, with names, histories, and personalities. Before Spanish colonization, many Andean ethnic groups traced their origins directly to specific mountains. One group-the Collaguas of the Colca Valley-further commemorated this intimate relationship by shaping the heads of their newborns in the form of their mountain-ancestor. Drawing on the bioarchaeological, genomic, and chemical isotope analysis of ancient human remains from the Colca Valley, this public lecture paints a new picture of the history of the Collaguas by integrating the ‘stories' written in bone with their own narratives of origin, migration, and conquest. Weaving together multiple lines of evidence, this talk reveals a mountain world formed by webs of relationships that connected people, places, and mountains across deep time, generations, and individual lives.