Pre-Hispanic Chiefs in Panama Were Born to Rule

National Geographic ^ | June 20, 2013 | A. R. Williams

[SunkenCiv]

Archaeologist Julia Mayo works at a site called El Caño near the Pacific coast 90 miles southwest of Panama City. During five years of excavation, she has uncovered the burials of gold-laden chiefs from a still-unnamed civilization that flourished for several centuries before the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s...

She's exhumed more than three dozen individuals, and three offered an answer: Boys in this culture seem to have enjoyed rank and privilege from the moment of their birth...

As Mayo surveyed the deepening excavation one day, the meaning of the artifacts suddenly came to her: They were so small because they belonged to a baby. A boy who was born to rule...

In 2011 she found a similar group of gold ornaments -- three breastplates, four arm cuffs, and two earrings -- as well as a beaded necklace of green stones. But again, no bones.

Finally, during Mayo's most recent field season, which ended late last month, she found the evidence she needed: gold arm cuffs, inscribed with images of the culture's crocodile god, which adorned the skeleton of someone young -- a 12-year-old male, according to physical anthropologist Aioze Trujillo of the Universidad Complutense in Madrid.

Close by lay the remains of a supreme chief. Discovered in 2011, he wore gold breastplates, beads, bells, mysterious figurines in fantastical shapes, and arm cuffs also inscribed with images of the crocodile god.

Father and son? Mayo plans to do genetic tests to find out.

[SunkenCiv]

Subtitle: New discovery provides evidence for inherited power, points to complex culture.

Two images of a fierce crocodile god appear on a boy's gold arm cuff. Photograph courtesy Julia Mayo

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v6qyVpu8bU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiwakoMTJ_0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toP4UtQZiw8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-NshzYK9y04

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[central_va]

Something very boring about heart eaters.

[SunkenCiv]

aorta be a disclaimer.

[onedoug]

All the better to help them eat each other.

[blueunicorn6]

I am going to be buried with etchings in metal plates of aardvarks. A thousand years from now, some jackass will dig up my bones and publish an article about how we worshipped aardvarks. Will we be remembered for space travel, or harnessing the atom or medicine? Nope. We worshipped aardvarks. I play the long game.

[TADSLOS]

ROFL.