No Booth, but Plenty of Bones!

Ok, so I promised some people (cough, jane, cough) updates on bones, so here goes nothing...

In Copacabana, I was supposed to just be finishing up collecting some data for my advisor, Dale, from two sites that he worked on there in 2006 or so. However, Sergio has just started to excavate a new site, Cundisa, which has about 3000 years of occupation (Yaya-Mama, Tiwanaku, and Inka) and 114 tombs that no one has looked at yet, since excavation. Sergio asked if I would go through and do a basic inventory of what each burial included bone-wise, and note anything that seemed abnormal (trauma, disease etc). Most of the burials were poorly preserved bc of years of rain as well as disturbance from plowing, and the Inka poking into other people´s burials. Freaking nosy Inka... :)

Anyway, found some cool stuff amongst the 114 tombs- two people with crazy bad periosteal disease and osteomyletis, lots of young children (identified only by teeth bc the bones were so terrible, ugh), and two instances of probably interpersonal violence (skull fractures! woo!). One of the skull fractures had started to heal but definitely probably caused the guys death first, and the other was operated/trephined-- ie his people cut into his skull to try and fix the injury but it definitely didnt work. Really neat for me to find though bc I´ve never seen that in the record before in my experience, and supposedly this burial is Yaya-mama (1500ish years ago) and there isn´t much previous evidence of them practicing treponation. Its possible since many of the burials were disturbed that its an Inka boy, not yayamama, but its unclear. I´m heading back to Bolivia in a week and plan to look at the excavation records and pictures and see if I can write it up for an SAA presentation/short paper etc.

Now, here in Peru, I´m comparing dental age with long bone length. Long bone length is one way many bioarchs tell age of a person at time of death, if teeth or other indicators aren´t available. However, people in the Andes are fairly short, both currently and historically and its really hasn´t been systematically studied to see how this affects ageing of skeletons. So far, after looking at my measurements on about 75 individuals 21 and under, its seems like there is about a 2 year age difference between how old their teeth say they are, and how long one would expect the long bones to be. Pretty interesting! Another archaeologist here working on ceramics thinks someone has investigated this on the North Coast of Peru so I´ll have to check out that dissertation and compare results.

Oof ok. I think thats all I got for now. I just got permission to look at a few more collections here which is good bc I finished the first 3 sites (Omo, Omo Alto, and Rio Muerto) today after just 4 days of work! Good thing theres more to see in Bolivia next week bc I had planned on this work here taking me a month or so, hahah. Oh well, so it goes!

I´m keeping my eyes open for Booth, Caryn. (OH speaking of, I saw an episode of Bones here in Spanish and it was way funny. The one of the airplane to China, of all places. They call her ¨Huesos¨which is way less cool than Bones, but understandable...)