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...