Pacha and camay in the Andes

Andean ontologies inform how the archaeological record is understood, as illustrated by a rich, growing corpus (Arnold & Hastorf Reference Arnold and Hastorf2008; Bray Reference Bray2015; Groleau Reference Groleau2009; Jennings et al. Reference Jennings, Berquist and Spence-Morrow2018; Kosiba et al. Reference Kosiba, Janusek and Cummins2020; Lau Reference Lau2012; Lozada & Tantaleán Reference Lozada and Tantaleán2019; Swenson Reference Swenson2015b; Weismantel Reference Weismantel2015a). Two oft-cited Quechua terms are especially relevant to understanding the ontology of alterity, distance and mortuary practices. First, pacha unifies time, earth and place—it is simultaneously ‘a moment or interval in time and a locus or extension in space’ that can exist at any scale (Salomon & Urioste Reference Salomon and Urioste1991, 14). Andean people situated the past in front of their bodies as they moved through ‘a world pregnant with the past’ (VanValkenburgh Reference VanValkenburgh2017, 124). Sacred places, things and bodies collapsed embodied experience with time, enabling people to tap into the powerful and ancestral past to influence the future (Bray Reference Bray2018; Chase Reference Chase2015; Janusek Reference Janusek2020; Seoane & Culquichicón-Venegas Reference Seoane and Culquichicón-Venegas2018; Wilkinson & D’Altroy Reference Wilkinson and D’Altroy2018). Second, camay/kamay, or sami (Allen Reference Allen2002), is the vital animating essence perpetually flowing between bodies, things, places and pacha (Arnold Reference Arnold2018; Bastien Reference Bastien1985b; Bray Reference Bray2009, 200; Tantaleán Reference Tantaleán2019). This essence is partible, and can be harnessed to bring things or people into and out of living or animated states by transforming extant vitality in the universe (Salomon & Urioste Reference Salomon and Urioste1991, 16–17). Raw, unworked materials like stone (Bray Reference Bray2009; Dean Reference Dean2010), raw human bodies from other places (Janusek Reference Janusek2020), and hardened bones or mummified dead (Allen Reference Allen1982; Reference Allen2002; Canessa 2000; Gose Reference Gose2018; Ødegaard Reference Ødegaard2018) have powerful and potentially dangerous camay that must be carefully mediated. Pacha and camay help clarify how mortuary rituals used these hardened substances as means of connecting to others of many kinds, collapsed into a unified space-time.

Camay explains how bodies, places and things are relationally and incrementally made (Allen Reference Allen1982; Reference Allen2002; Sillar Reference Sillar1996), while pacha blurs together life and death, past and present (Armando Muro et al. Reference Armando Muro, Jaime Castillo and Tomasto-Cagigao2019; Villanueva Criales Reference Villanueva Criales2019, 273) to link bodies and places metaphorically and metaphysically. The ‘geographic body’ (Bastien Reference Bastien1985b) serves as a metaphor for animated landscape features. The head represents all-seeing mountain peaks (Arnold & Hastorf Reference Arnold and Hastorf2008; Glowacki Reference Glowacki2019; Hamilton Reference Hamilton2018; Lozada Reference Lozada2019; Weismantel Reference Weismantel2015b), the circulatory system represents waterways and infrastructure linking settlements (Bastien Reference Bastien1985a,b; Gose Reference Gose2018) or the cosmos (Classen Reference Classen1993), and joints and cracks of the body represent ruptures and transitional features like rifts, quebradas, caves and rivers (Dean Reference Dean2010). The hardened, mummified bodies of important leaders referenced their ancestral pacarinas or origin places (Kelly Reference Kelly2001; Lau Reference Lau2008; Salomon Reference Salomon1995), just as capacocha sacrifices of beautiful children on mountain peaks connected communities with Inca officials and ancestral mountain deities (apus). These bodily analogies are often extended and vitalized by camay which can bring humans, animals or things into being. As one of myriad examples, Swenson (Reference Swenson2020) summarizes how mask wearing in Amazon served as a bodily portent for shifting into other relational perspectives, while in the Andes, masks communicated ethnic identity while extending camay/camac to the wearer and their community. In these ways, Andean bodies and cemeteries inscribe(d) social memory on the landscape (sensu Buikstra & Nystrom Reference Buikstra and Nystrom2015; Connerton Reference Connerton2014), constituting relationships between the living, dead, ancestors, communities and landscapes (Nielsen Reference Nielsen2009; Velasco Reference Velasco2014) along with the atomic fabric of and between those beings. Fortunately, biogeochemical analysis permits us to identify the incorporation of camay from distant people, places and things into communities through mortuary ritual.

Archaeological background: mortuary landscapes and grave offerings at Uraca

Mortuary landscapes at Uraca were used for nearly a millennium or more, across the Early Intermediate Period (EIP) and early Middle Horizon (c. 100 bce–750 ce) (Scaffidi & Tung Reference Scaffidi and Tung2020). The presence of exotic grave goods, high violence-related trauma (67 per cent of adults experienced cranial trauma) and overrepresentation of adult males at the elite sector of the Uraca cemetery suggests it was a special burial ground for injured elite male combatants and select female and subadults associated with them (Scaffidi & Tung Reference Scaffidi and Tung2020). The fact of sector-based differences and absence of centralized structures of any kind suggest those buried at Uraca belonged to hierarchical chiefdoms that may have been linked into broader networks spanning the Majes Valley and possibly the region. Like many southern Peruvian desert sites, however, all sectors of the cemetery were intensely looted and no domestic areas were preserved. Individual human mummy bundles were placed in unlined shafts in the sand, so they were easily torn apart and commingled, precluding the association of any individual with their grave offerings. Nonetheless, sectors are divided by approximately 3 km and modern housing complexes, so broad elite versus sub-elite sector comparisons prove meaningful despite the looting damage.

Uraca was likely chosen for sacred burial rites because of the inherent contrasts between sector landscapes. The elite southern burial promontory is bounded by rusty red geological uplift layers angling inward to point toward its gleaming fine, white sands. Underneath this high, visually dominating alluvial fan, the lush Majes Valley spills out to its widest point. The elite sector is highly visible from the valley floor, casting watchful eyes on passers by. Viewshed analysis confirms the elite sector is quantitatively greater than the sub-elite sector, further substantiating its sacrality (Scaffidi Reference Scaffidi2018). The sub-elite sector to the north is also visually demarcated—but instead, by dark stone and soil, cloaked in the curving hillside and obscured from seeing and being seen. Especially from the elite sector, the dead and living mourners could survey a near-360° view of the river’s undulations and canals, oncoming travellers navigating river or high desert paths, and the high, sandy plain now called Toro Muerto just to the south, filled with hundreds of boulders carved with thousands of intricate and animated rock-art scenes.

Uraca burials are centred along the axis mundi of arguably the largest interconnected concentration of rock art in South America—a broad southern Peruvian petroglyph tradition that converges in the Lower Majes Valley at the immense Toro Muerto petroglyph field. This ethereal and otherworldly field of carved igneous dacite boulders was a centralized ritual gathering place where scenes of daily, ritual and supernatural life were created and worshipped, as evidenced by the many camelid and stone offerings recently excavated underneath them (Wołoszyn et al. Reference Wołoszyn, Ruiz and Rozwadowski2019). Here, and throughout the region, stone carvings emphasize animal and humanoid beings participating in death rituals, interweaving a sacred transit network that simultaneously facilitated travel and exchange of materials, people and cosmologies related to life and death.

The Toro Muerto scenes portray many of the materials excavated from the Uraca cemetery—felines, trophy heads, feathered headdresses, mummy bundles and camelid sacrifices—as well as dancing, drumming, musical performances and communication with the non-human world (Fig. 2). Uraca’s people may have controlled communal access to Toro Muerto and sacred lands within their community’s geographic wingspan, and the nearby elite sector of Uraca may have been reserved for esteemed combatants or caretakers of this sacred corridor (Scaffidi & Tung Reference Scaffidi and Tung2020). These visually linked contexts uniquely illustrate how at least some petroglyph abstractions connected real-life practices, beings and things between these powerful places.

Figure 2. Examples of mortuary scenes from Toro Muerto: (a) masked dancers with headdresses; (b) feline consuming a human head; (c) camelid sacrifices.

Human and feline trophy heads

For example, the excavation team recovered 20 adult male trophy heads (12 severed, injured crania or skulls and 8 disarticulated mandibles presenting the masseter muscle removal typical of trophies from southern Peru) from both the elite and sub-elite sectors (Scaffidi Reference Scaffidi2020; Scaffidi et al. Reference Scaffidi, Tung and Knudson2021). These trophies all dated to the EIP and early Middle Horizon and likely comprised combatant males captured and killed by Uraca’s people or were stolen from trophy caches during raids on other settlements. The crania of these individuals were intensely and violently defleshed and manipulated after death, which included extracting soft tissues of the eye orbits and recreating new eyes of animal hides or textiles stretched over cotton balls. Excavators also recovered a pampas cat cranium along with half of its mandible and four paws (Scaffidi Reference Scaffidi2020) in the sub-elite sector, together with a cache of three human trophy skulls. Like the human trophies (pictured in Scaffidi Reference Scaffidi2020), its eyes were extracted and reformed, but with bright red fringed textile (Fig. 3) instead of the neutrally coloured materials used in the human trophies’ eye orbits. Given Uraca’s location between the highlands and the coast alongside the interregional hub at Toro Muerto, it was unsurprising that ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr of at least six of the decapitated adult male trophy heads and at least one of the non-trophy adult males originated beyond the Majes Valley, although the feline trophy was not yet analysed (Scaffidi et al. Reference Scaffidi, Tung and Knudson2021). These findings demonstrated exchange interactions between Uraca’s people and non-locals and prompted additional testing of the feline trophy and grave goods to elucidate whether other non-local beings and things were integrated into Uraca’s mortuary landscapes.

Figure 3. Feline trophy head and paws from sector IIC at Uraca; note the bright red textile placed in the eye sockets.

Animal remains

The absence of domestic components at Uraca suggests the animals recovered from the tombs were either offerings for the dead or funerary foods for mourners—although the absence of communal structures, burning, or processing marks on the animal bones makes the latter unlikely. Animal remains were only recovered from the elite sector, including three fragments of river prawns (Cryphiops caementarius), a raptor claw of an unknown species, several bags of unspecified bird bone and two complete skeletons from members of the Anura family (frogs or toads which could have been Rhinella spinulosa, Pleurodema marmoratum, Telmatobius arequipensis or Telmatobius peruvianus) (Scaffidi Reference Scaffidi2018)—the latter are similar to the anurans deposited in similar contexts at contemporaneous mid-elevation sites to the south in Moquegua (Rubinatto Serrano et al. Reference Rubinatto Serrano, Vallejo-Pareja, deFrance, Baitzel and Goldstein2022). Since the anurans and prawn were recovered from the same unit at the highest elevation of the elite sector, commingled with human mummy bundles, it is unlikely they ascended of their own volition to the tombs. However, the fact that none of these anuran species is currently distributed below 1000 masl (Rubinatto Serrano et al. Reference Rubinatto Serrano, Vallejo-Pareja, deFrance, Baitzel and Goldstein2022), at Uraca’s elevation raises the possibility that they or other animal grave offerings may have been gathered from other places for mortuary deposition.

Additionally, there were over 500 pounds of bone and hides from domesticated camelids (Llama sp.), surface-collected or excavated from both sectors (Scaffidi Reference Scaffidi2018). Llamas and alpacas were deposited whole and eventually commingled with human mummy bundles—their fur, hides and limbs were all fully preserved. Deep cutmarks at the leg joints without evidence of further butchering or burning suggests these animals were not consumed as food but instead were sacrificed as offerings or retainers beside mummies. The joint cutmarks may have been necessary to fold them into flexed positions for interment. While camelids were inherently mobile throughout the ancient Andes, strontium isotope analysis of contemporaneous camelids used as food at the Middle Horizon Wari colony of Quilcapampa in the neighboring Sihuas Valley (Melton et al. Reference Melton, Alaica and Biwer2023) suggest that routine (whether seasonal or annual) movements of these animals can indeed be delineated across key corridors running from the highlands through mid-elevation yunga zones and on to the coast.

Musical instruments

Musical instruments made up a significant part of the grave goods at Uraca, but only in the elite sector. The corpus of at least 54 instruments included short whistles made of camelid long bones, slender flutes of painted raptor long bones, one stretched animal-hide drumskin (possibly from a camelid) and non-functional miniature reed panpipes (Fig. 4). Together with the omnipresent dancing scenes from Toro Muerto, it is likely that pitched blasts, sustained notes and rhythmic drumming filled the mortuary soundscape of the elite sector, just like at La Real upriver where similar instruments were recovered (Alaica et al. Reference Alaica, González La Rosa, Yépez Álvarez and Jennings2022; Jennings et al. Reference Jennings, Tung, Yépez Álvarez, Lucano and Hurtado2015). Indeed, these musical practices connected Uraca mortuary ritual to other places within the Majes Valley and beyond, but where did these instruments and the raw materials they were made of originate? Furthermore, it is unclear whether the camelid whistles were made from the same or different individuals. Isotopic analysis can begin to shed light on the geographic locations of these animals when they were killed to harvest bone for carving.

Figure 4. Instruments from Uraca’s elite sector: (a) camelid bone whistles (left) and raptor bone flute (right); (b) miniature reed panpipes.

Woven river cane objects

The grave good assemblage demonstrates Uraca’s people were skilled textile artisans, as elaborate cotton and wool burial shrouds, yarn balls, raw cotton and weaving implements were omnipresent finds at both sectors (Scaffidi Reference Scaffidi2018). Nearly as common were woven grave offerings made of river cane like baskets and headdresses (tocados) (Fig. 5). While the species of grasses and river cane present in the Uraca materials have not been confirmed, it is likely they were any of the locally abundant species that grew along ancient river margins, such as stems of totora (Shoenoplectus californicus), junco (Shoenoplectus sp.), carrizo (Phragmites australis) and members of the Cyperaceae and Magnoliopsida species commonly used in contemporaneous archaeological contexts from the Ica Valley to the north (Roque et al. Reference Roque, Cano and Cook2003). These species are used today in the Majes Valley and neighbouring valleys and Uraca’s baskets and headdresses may have been crafted from local plants or plants imported from nearby or distant coastal valleys.

Figure 5. Examples of woven river cane items: a) basketry, b) headdress or tocado, and c) human trophy head carrying cord fragments.

Geographic origins of beings and things buried at Uraca

⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr results: probable non-local camelids, instruments, trophies and basketry

The combined new and published datasets range from ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr = 0.70609–0.70954, mean = 0.70818, median = 0.70832, and 1σ = 0.00058 (n = 91). New ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr results are reported in Supplemental Table 1 along with burial context and AMS dates where available. Elemental concentrations (Supplemental Table 2) do not indicate diagenetic contamination of bone or enamel according to Kamenov’s minimum thresholds (Kamenov et al. Reference Kamenov, Lofaro, Goad and Krigbaum2018). Because the range of the SHR fauna and plants (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr = 0.70756–0.70954) fully encompasses the range of the teeth from human non-trophy individuals previously identified as local (Scaffidi et al. Reference Scaffidi, Kamenov, Sharpe and Krigbaum2022) (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr = 0.70812–0.70838, n = 33), the local range is defined here by the mean ±2σ of the non-trophy human individuals, SHR fauna and plants (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr = 0.70771–0.70890). Numbers and proportions of probable locals and non-locals based on this range are compared in Figure 7 and Table 1.

Figure 7. Published and new Uraca ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr data (n=91). Reference lines indicate the local range based on the mean ±2σ of the human non-trophy heads and small home range animals (SHR)—the frogs, feline and prawn. The SHR low outlier is the feline trophy head.

Table 1. Counts and proportions of beings and things of probable local and non-local origins, with the total proportions calculated on the bottom row. For human individuals, counts reflect the number of teeth sampled, which is greater than the number of individuals for humans.

The Uraca camelids and camelid bone whistles ranged from ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr = 0.70609–0.70942 (n = 23). Just under half (11/23 = 47.8 per cent) are non-local, while the remainder are likely from the Lower Majes Valley or geologically similar areas. Of the non-local camelids, eight show low ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr consistent with less radiogenic near-coastal regions, the neighbouring Sihuas Valley or pockets of lower ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr in the heterogenous geologies of nearby highlands (Gómez Tapias et al. Reference Gómez Tapias, Jorge and Ramírez2019; Scaffidi & Knudson Reference Scaffidi and Knudson2020; Schenk et al. Reference Schenk, Viger and Anderson1999). Three of four camelid bone whistles have ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr higher than the local range, suggesting they were either produced in the highlands or locally from highland-originating camelids. The similarity in ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr for these whistles could indicate production from the same herd, or from bones of the same animal that remodelled during different years—bone remodelling rates for camelids are not well understood. The frogs (n = 2) and the river prawn (n = 1) were local and likely gathered from the banks of the Majes River as offerings, possibly to enable watery passages for the dead. The trophy feline claw ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr is non-local, consistent with more coastal locations.

The woven vegetal material samples (n = 10, including two trophy head carrying cords) tend toward the lower end of the local range. This could reflect the more constricted bioavailable Sr in the riverine environment than in the broader food web averaged by human and animal diets. However, one basket sample showed the highest ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr of all (0.70954)—clearly of non-local origin and not likely to be from yunga zones in any neighbouring valleys. Both trophy head carrying cords are also consistent with local ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr (just as were the trophy individuals they bound). The maximum difference in ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr between human trophies and their carrying cords are minimal: only 0.00050 for individual 7009, and 0.00020 for individual 7008. This suggests that, whether the heads were taken from the Lower Majes Valley or non-local males from geologically similar areas, their carrying cords seem to have been woven from locally available plants, perhaps as the trophy makers or takers integrated their sami into the community through this weaving and binding.

More non-local animals and craft objects relative to non-trophy human burials

Supplemental Table 1 shows burials and offerings coded according to three functional groupings: (1) art or craft objects (basketry, human and feline trophy heads, and camelid whistles); (2) animal offerings not transformed into craft objects; and (3) non-trophy human individuals. This classification demonstrates clear distinctions in the origins of functional subgroups (Fig. 8). The animal grouping shows the highest proportion of non-local samples (9/23 = 39.1 per cent), relative to art or craft objects (8/36 = 22.1 per cent) and human non-trophy burials (1/33 = 3.1 per cent) (Fig. 8). Furthermore, animal interments—driven by the camelids—are significantly more variable (1σ = 0.00079) than art or craft objects (1σ = 0.00051) and non-trophy humans (1σ = 0.00021), Kruskal-Wallis Squared Ranks, H(2) = 17.246, p<.001. Finally, there is a greater proportion of non-local trophy samples (4/22 = 12.2 per cent) than non-local human burial samples (1/33 = 3.0 per cent), although this difference is not quite statistically significant, X ² (df = 1, N =55) = 3.67, p = 0.055.

Figure 8. Comparison of proportions of probable non-local offerings and burials at Uraca by object or being types.

Discussion: world-making through mortuary incorporation of alterity

Camelids, the wild feline, and riverine animals were key types of animal others recovered from Uraca tombs that mediated camay from other places through mortuary ritual. Andean animals are sentient ‘earth beings’ with human-like personhood, consciousness, agency, desires and perspectives (Bray Reference Bray2009; Hill Reference Hill2013; Ødegaard Reference Ødegaard2018), with camay that infuses their ‘species power’ (Salomon & Urioste Reference Salomon and Urioste1991, 16) to transform humans into animals and vice versa. The ritual use of animals in the Andes echoes Helms’s (Reference Helms1998, 164–6) contention that collecting, manipulating and wearing durable, portable animal parts (e.g. pelts, teeth, claws and feathers) channelled ancestral power for future durability. The Andean archaeological record is replete with depictions of human–animal transformations (Arnold Reference Arnold2018; Cordy-Collins Reference Cordy-Collins1998; DeMarrais Reference DeMarrais2018; Groleau Reference Groleau2009; Lau Reference Lau2017) and animal impersonation (Hastorf & Kyriakidis Reference Hastorf and Kyriakidis2007; Nielsen Reference Nielsen2009; Paul Reference Paul1990; Proulx Reference Proulx2001) that demonstrate linkages between species power and places of the dead.

Since domesticated camelids were essential sources of food, fleece and transportation, they were commonly sacrificed to balance cosmic vitality (Bolin Reference Bolin2010; Prieto et al. Reference Prieto, Verano and Goepfert2019; Valdez et al. Reference Valdez, Bettcher and Huamaní2020). Camelids have human-like social organization (Goepfert et al. Reference Goepfert, Dufour, Prieto and Verano2020; Sallnow Reference Sallnow1987) and can speak with and lead their herders (Mannheim Reference Mannheim2020). In contrast to wild animals (e.g. deer and wild camelids) controlled by the apus, domesticated camelids embodied humans and could stand in for them in rituals (Alaica Reference Alaica2018; Goepfert Reference Goepfert2010). Also, as the only long-distance transportation in the pre-Hispanic Andes, camelids connected space and time—they might be viewed as time-travellers (Lazzari Reference Lazzari2005, 131). Camelids were transitional agents, moving the living through space-time, nourishing the dead and transporting their things throughout the journey to their pacarinas. Consistent with this mediating role, camelids were sometimes depicted as decapitators (Baitzel & Rodríguez Reference Baitzel and Rodríguez2019; Janusek Reference Janusek2020; Nielsen Reference Nielsen2009), dispersing camay from freshly dead to nourish the world.

At Uraca, biogeochemical results suggest interred camelids were intentionally selected from animals that moved between broad geographies including nearby yunga, coastal and near-highland origins, similar to contemporaneous camelids from Quilcapampa in the neighboring Sihuas Valley, where camelids from domestic food trash heaps ranged from ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr = 0.70594–0.70918 (n = 10) (Melton et al. Reference Melton, Alaica and Biwer2023). These broad ranges beg the question of how to define local and non-local camelids—they were presumably and inherently mobile, grazing and foddering beyond village centres and probably moving seasonally to access patchy resources. Camelid tooth enamel development and weaning rates are not well understood, so tooth samples will always average variable food ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr over an unclear period. Nonetheless, high and low outliers indicate Uraca’s camelid moved to foddering or grazing zones beyond core Majes valley sites, thereby functionally connected living and dead humans between those outlying places. Furthermore, since most of the camelid bone whistles are from distant geographic origins, there may have been an intentional effort to use raw materials from distant geographies to endow musical performances with connective capacity.

In contrast to human-like camelids, felines were wild and powerful killers controlled by the apus and may have been stand-ins for human or non-human agents in mortuary ritual at Uraca. Building on Viveiros de Castro’s Amazonian examples, Lau argues that Andean hunters could occasionally slip into feline form to hunt game or warrior heads, serving as mediators between ‘the familiar village world and the strange vital outside’ and between life and death (Lau Reference Lau2012, 121). Myriad Paracas and Nasca ceramic and textile scenes depict the native pampas cat (Leopardus colocolo) decapitating or consuming the vital energies of human heads, standing at the nexus between living and dead. These violent negotiations between opposing forms are exemplified at Tiwanaku, where Janusek (Reference Janusek2020) argues that living stone monoliths of feline chachapumas served as sacrificial gods that transformed ‘raw’ people from other places into Tiwanaku people as they processed into the city. Pampas cats are omnipresent in the rock art of lowland Arequipa valleys, including at Toro Muerto, where they may have marked village boundaries as chachapumas. Since pampas cats have small home ranges of approximately 20–50 km (Villalba et al. Reference Villalba, Bernal, Nowell and Macdonald2012), and the only similar ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr appears in skeletons from Beringa and Quilcapampa, the pampa cat trophy was very likely carried in from beyond the lower Majes Valley. This, combined with the fact that the feline dates to several hundred years later than at least one of its cache-mates suggests both geographic and temporal distance were aspects of its cosmological power critical to the living who interred them across many generations.

Since water bodies divided the dead from the living (Cortés Reference Cortés2020; Harris Reference Harris1982), riverine creatures may have mediated between life and death like camelids and felines. While taphonomic analysis of hundreds of toads (Bufonidae) and frogs (Leptodactylae) from Khonkho Wankane suggests they were the result of natural die-offs in the margins of Lake Titicaca (Pokines Reference Pokines2013), other specimens excavated from high or dry desert sites like Beringa in the Majes Valley (Tung & Knudson Reference Tung and Knudson2018), Cerro Baúl (deFrance Reference deFrance2014) and Cahuachi in Nasca (Orefici Reference Orefici2011) demonstrate that amphibians were often used in ritual or as grave offerings. In contrast to amphibians which were likely not eaten, freshwater shrimp (Cryphiops caementarius) were a main protein source in low- to mid-elevation southern Peruvian valleys. The often-looted contexts of lowland sites can preclude clear identification of funerary versus domestically consumed foods, but intact Otoro Valley tombs demonstrate that shrimp were sometimes offered as foods for the dead (Stanish Reference Stanish2012). It is not surprising that local riverine animals were used at Uraca, as their watery origins were likely perceived as a characteristic of supernatural distance.

Similarly, given the watery origins and abundance of local river cane, it is surprising to find any possible non-local specimens in the Uraca assemblage. However, there are examples (Acuto et al. Reference Acuto, Kergaravat and Amuedo2014) in the southern Andes of non-local objects and woods used as grave offerings to integrate plants from different moieties (family lineages) into mortuary landscapes. While the trophy carrying cords made of river cane were both of local origins, one of the trophy’s carrying cords (from Individual 7008) was made of human hair, which was probably non-local according to late-life diet (Scaffidi et al. Reference Scaffidi, Tung and Knudson2021). This geographic diversity suggests that woven mortuary arts were crafted from materials special to the deceased, place of ancestral origins, as well as local materials—weaving the dead into the fabric of local landscape power.

Finally, the human trophies, whether from the Majes Valley, geologically similar outside places, or geographically distant places, were selected from the same general network of human interaction as the non-trophies and the broader grave goods assembled at Uraca. Trophy-taking and grave good procurement may have been constricted to the same near-neighbouring communities and regions that Uraca’s people commonly interacted with through trade, marriage, or other travel or relationships. Mastering distance by assembling distant people, animals and things probably yielded power for human and non-human agents alike. Just as the apus have more power the broader their geographic reach is (Skar Reference Skar1994), mortuary places probably had more communal power when things and beings from other places were carefully assembled at those mortuary landscapes.

This study is, however, limited by the degree of looting at Uraca—artifacts, trophy heads and camelid interments cannot be associated with human burials—as well as the limited isotopic reference material available in the region. Baseline studies of bioavailable Sr in Majes Valley plants and fauna are ongoing and will continue to clarify expected ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values for local inhabitants. Nonetheless, the fact that trophy heads dated hundreds of years before other trophy heads, grave goods, and camelid burials were continuously bundled and re-bundled together illustrate the importance of assembling things and beings from contexts that extended beyond the space and time of the Lower Majes Valley in the late EIP to early Middle Horizon.