Broken noses for the gods: ritual battles in the Atacama Desert during the Tiwanaku period

ABSTRACT

The sample consists of 226 skulls from the Atacameño cemetery of Coyo Oriente (639-910 AD), associated with the Tiwanaku period. The authors analyzed signs of acute trauma typically associated with violence, and the results were 12 percent of men and 9.9 percent of women displaying any type of lesion related to violence. In males, concentration of these non-lethal lesions in the nasal region (10.4 percent) as opposed to a random distribution over the entire skull (1.6 percent), suggests that the blows were struck during rituals. The cultural context of this period, with a strong ideological influence from Tiwanaku, supports the ritual hypothesis, since both the ethnographic as well as archeological records point to the existence of non-lethal violent bleeding with ritual beating to the face. Such rituals persist to this day among certain Andean populations. Among women, the most plausible hypothesis for the lesions (3.9 percent in the skull, 4.9 percent in the nasal bones, and 0.9 percent in the face) is domestic conflicts, since they show a random distribution. Previous studies with other Atacameño samples had indicated the same results for women.