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Smallpox: The Triumph over the Most Terrible of the Ministers of Death Smallpox has been one of humankind's greatest scourges since time immemorial. Even illnesses as terrible as the plague, cholera, and yellow fever have not had such a universal and persistent impact. Smallpox is believed to have appeared at the time of the first agricultural settlements in northeastern Africa, around 10 000 BC (2). It probably spread from Africa to India by means of Egyptian merchants in the last millennium BC (3). The earliest evidence of skin lesions resembling those of smallpox is found on the faces of mummies...

Archaeologists recently identified the remains of four human funerary burials from approximately 3,800 years ago in a space in northern Peru associated with a water cult. The bundled funeral remains belong to two children, a teenager, and an adult. They were buried facing the Andean mountains and interred with symbolic offerings, such as stone pendants and snail shells. The remains were found nestled between mud and stone walls near a valley in Peru’s dry, coastal Viru province by the Virú Valley Archaeological Research Project (PAVI) of the National University of Trujillo (UNT). Related Articles The ancient neolithic monument of Stonehenge...

Police in Peru made a surprise discovery when they searched a delivery man who came to their attention for acting drunk at an archaeological site in Puno. Inside his cooler bag was an ancient mummy. The man said that he had been sharing his room with the bandaged mummy and considered it "a kind of spiritual girlfriend". He had put the remains in the bag to show them off to his friends, he said. He explained that he kept "Juanita", as he had nicknamed the mummy, in a box in his room, next to the TV. He added that it...

The mummy, known as "Juanita" or the "Inca Ice Maiden", was an Inca girl who is thought to have been sacrificed in a ritual more than 500 years ago. Scientists worked with a specialist in facial reconstruction to build a silicon bust of the mummy. Johan Reinhard, the US archaeologist who first found the mummy in 1995, said the bust "makes her even more alive". A team of Peruvian and Polish scientists worked with Oscar Nilsson, a specialist in facial reconstruction from Sweden, to build the silicon bust of the teenage girl. The scientists said body scans, skull measurements, DNA...

Archaeologists in the Peruvian Andes have discovered an Inca bathing complex built half a millennia ago, which they believe may have served the elite of the sprawling empire than once dominated large swathes of South America.Found near the "House of the Inca" in the Huanuco Pampa archaeological zone in central Peru, local archaeologists believe that the bath may have served a religious purpose for high-ranking members of the Inca empire, which 500 years ago extended from southern Ecuador to the center of Chile.Luis Paredes Sanchez, project manager at Huanuco Pampa, said the structure was similar to "more hierarchical, restricted and...

A new study co-authored by a George Washington University research professor examines the Inka Empire's (also known as the Incan Empire and the Inca Empire) instruments of culture and control through a well-preserved article of clothing discovered in a centuries-old Chilean cemetery.Researchers excavating the burial site along Caleta Vítor Bay in northern Chile found a tunic, or unku (see above), which would have been worn by a man who commanded respect and prestige in the Inka Empire. Unkus were largely standardized attire meeting technical and stylistic specifications imposed by imperial authorities.The Caleta Vítor unku, however, goes beyond the strict mandates...

Long before the Incas rose to power in Peru and began to celebrate their sun god, a little known civilization was building the earliest known astronomical observatory in the Americas. While not quite as old as sites like Stonehenge, these ancient ruins, known as Chankillo, are considered a "masterpiece of human creative genius", holding unique features not seen anywhere else in the world. Based in the coastal desert of Peru, the archaeological site famously contains a row of 13 stone towers, which together trace the horizon of a hill, north to south, like a toothy bottom grin. 1920px ThirteenTowersOfChanquilloFromFortress The...

<p>The ancient Incan city we know as 'Machu Picchu' should probably be called 'Picchu' or 'Huayna Picchu', according to a new analysis of historical documents.</p><p>In 1911, when the White American historian and explorer, Hiram Bingham, was first led to the ancient Incan ruins, he asked a local landowner to write down the name of the site in his field journal.</p>

Researchers excavating 500-year-old graves in southern Peru have unearthed 192 human spines threaded onto reed posts. Describing this remarkable discovery in the journal Antiquity, the authors say this unusual assemblage of human vertebrae may have provided a means for indigenous people to reconstruct dead bodies damaged by European grave robbers. The skewered spines were recovered from burial sites in the Chincha Valley, where the local community was decimated by famine and disease epidemics following the arrival of Europeans. According to the researchers, the Chincha population declined from over 30,000 households in 1533 to just 979 half a century later, and...

Just last month, CAIR’s Dallas-Fort-Worth chapter held an event called "In Pursuit of Freedom" at the East Plano Islamic Center in Plano, Texas, calling for Siddiqui’s release, claiming she had been "kidnapped, ripped apart from her children, shot at, renditioned to the U.S., and is currently serving an 86-year prison sentence for a crime she did not commit." On Nov. 18, the CAIR chapter held an online fundraiser for Siddiqui’s defense team. Days earlier, multiple Muslim advocacy groups, including CAIR, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), the Islamic Circle of North America Council for Social Justice (ICNA-CSJ), and the Muslim American...

Prior research has suggested that during the Late Horizon, a period of Inca history, the Inca rounded up people living outside of the Inca Empire and forced them to relocate to places inside the empire as a means of bolstering the population and thus the economy. Unfortunately, to date, evidence for such forced migrations has been scant. In this new effort, the researchers conducted a thorough investigation of the remains of six people buried in a cemetery in what was once a part of the Inca empire during the Late Horizon -- they suspected that all six were people who...

On this date in 1781, the last name in Incan rebellion met a horrible end in the ancient Incan capital of Cusco. José Gabriel Condorcanqui — rechristened Tupac Amaru II, as he was a distant descendant of the last Incan king — was a member of the privileged indigenous population depended upon by the Spanish to administer the forced and extorted labor that made its New World empire worth having. Condorcanqui evidently had an epiphany. In November 1780, he launched a well-planned rebellion by engineering the public execution of a hated corregidor Antonio de Arriaga at the hands of his...

(CNN) — Archeologists in Peru have uncovered the remains of around 250 children sacrificed by the pre-Columbian Chimú civilization. The remains are of children aged 4-12 years old, as well as 40 warriors, sacrificed between the 13th and 15th centuries, according to a video from Peruvian state media agency Andina. The Chimú civilization inhabited northern Peru before they were conquered by the Inca. They built Chan Chan, the largest city in pre-Columbian South America.

Something was amiss at the ruins of Iglesia Colorada, an ancient Incan village in the foothills of the Andes. In the remains of what had been a garbage dump, among ancient food scraps and shards of discarded pottery, researchers discovered four skulls. No bodies, no formal burial, no jewelry to carry on to an afterlife — just the skulls. No one knew why they were there. For over 15 years, since the skulls were uncovered in 2003, the mystery has baffled archaeologists. But two researchers at the National Museum of Natural History in Santiago, Chile, have proposed an explanation: The...

With the help of his professor, Gary Urton, a scholar of Pre-Columbian studies, Medrano interpreted a set of six khipus, knotted cords used for record keeping in the Inca Empire. By matching the khipus to a colonial-era Spanish census document, Medrano and Urton uncovered the meaning of the cords in greater detail than ever before. Their findings could contribute to a better understanding of daily life in the Andean civilization.

Pretty great video....

Construction of Machu Picchu was interrupted around 1450 by a powerful earthquake, leaving damage still evident today and prompting the Inca to perfect the seismic-resistant megalithic architecture that is now so famous throughout Cusco, according to a major new scientific study revealed by Peru’s state-run news agency Andina... The Cusco-Pata Research Project determined that a temblor of at least magnitude 6.5 struck during the reign of the 9th Inca Pachacutec while he was building his now iconic summer estate atop the saddle-ridge between two craggy mountain peaks. As a result, the Inca moved away from using smaller stones, assembled in...

Forget small nomadic tribes and pristine jungle: the southern Amazon was likely covered in a network of large villages and ceremonial centers before Columbus. Geoglyphs in the southern Amazon are evidence of a once-thriving population. Photograph courtesy of University of Exeter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Before Spanish invaders conquered South America, sparse groups of nomadic people clustered around the Amazon River, leaving the surrounding rain forest pristine and untouched. Or did they? New research suggests a very different story—an Amazonian region peppered with rain forest villages, ceremonial earthworks, and a much larger population than previously thought. The research, funded in part by the...

Members of the public regularly get in touch with Charles Stanish, an expert on Andean cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Two years ago, Stanish received a call from a man in Pittsburgh who had just seen a program claiming that aliens played a large role in the lives of ancient people. He was interested in getting Stanish’s take on a particular Peruvian site purported to be the handiwork of extraterrestrials. “I always try to be nice to people like that,” says Stanish. “For whatever reason, they are interested in the ancient past, and I share with them...

In the study, University of St. Andrews anthropologist Sabine Hyland analyzed string color, fiber and twist direction to identify 95 unique signs — enough to constitute a writing system — and proposed a phonetic decipherment of the khipus’ final strings, thought to represent family lineage names. ... Khipus are best known by archaeologists as record keeping devices of the Inca Empire, which encompassed over 18 million people and 3,000 miles of South America from the early 1400s until the Spanish conquest in 1532. The strings usually consist of a top cord, to which pendants are attached; the pendants may have...