In the arid Chincha Valley of Peru, local farmers had long encountered an eerie sight: human spines meticulously threaded onto wooden posts. Once dismissed as curious “ancient objects,” these remains have now emerged as one of the most compelling archaeological finds of recent years. A new study reveals that Indigenous people in the region developed this practice as a deliberate, ritualized response to the widespread destruction of their ancestors’ graves by Spanish colonists.
Archaeologists have documented nearly 200 examples of these “vertebrae-on-posts” across the Chincha Valley, the heartland of the once-powerful Chincha Kingdom. The findings, published in the journal Antiquity in February 2022, paint a vivid picture of cultural resilience amid colonial upheaval.
“These ‘vertebrae-on-posts’ were likely made to reconstruct the dead in response to grave looting,” explained lead researcher Jacob Bongers of the University of East Anglia. “Our findings suggest that vertebrae-on-posts represent a direct, ritualized, and indigenous response to European colonialism.”
Reassembling the Ancestors
Bongers and his team analyzed 192 threaded spines, the vast majority discovered within ancient collective tombs known as chullpas. These imposing structures sometimes contained the remains of hundreds of individuals. Strikingly, all but one of the posts held the vertebrae of a single person. In one exceptional case, a skull was still attached to the assembled spine.
Radiocarbon dating provides crucial chronological clarity. The bones themselves date from the early 16th century up to around 1530, but the threading onto posts occurred nearly 40 years later. This timeline aligns precisely with the period following the Spanish arrival in Peru, when looting of Indigenous graves became widespread.
“Looting of indigenous graves was widespread across the Chincha Valley in the colonial period,” Bongers noted. “Looting was primarily intended to remove grave goods made of gold and silver and would have gone hand in hand with European efforts to eradicate indigenous religious practices and funerary customs.”
For the Chincha people, the physical integrity of the body after death held profound spiritual importance. The desecration of tombs—often left in disarray after valuables were stripped—prompted a powerful act of cultural resistance: retrieving scattered remains and carefully reassembling them on wooden posts.
“When you look at all data we gathered, all of that supports the model that these were made after these tombs had been looted,” Bongers said. “They’re trying to reconstruct their dead; they’re picking up the pieces of their dead, and trying to put them back together.”
A Coordinated Cultural Response
The scale of the practice—nearly 200 documented examples distributed across the valley—suggests it was not the isolated act of a few individuals but a widely shared and coordinated response.
“The fact that there’s 192 of these and that they’re widespread… it means on one level that multiple groups of people coordinated and responded in a shared way, that this interesting practice was deemed the appropriate way of dealing with disturbed bodies of the dead,” Bongers explained.
The Chincha Kingdom, which flourished from approximately 1000 to 1400 CE as a wealthy, centralized society, had already been incorporated into the Inca Empire in the 15th century while retaining significant autonomy. The Spanish conquest, beginning in the 1530s, brought catastrophic change. Between 1533 and 1583, the number of heads of households in the region plummeted from 30,000 to just 979 amid famine, epidemics, and violence.
The threaded spines, Bongers argues, embody the profound turbulence of this era. They reflect how ritual and mortuary practices became sites of contestation as new colonial power structures took hold.
Graves as Windows into Humanity
The discovery offers more than a glimpse into resistance against colonialism; it underscores the universal significance of how societies treat their dead.
“Mortuary practices arguably are what make us human—this is one of the key distinguishing features of our species,” Bongers observed. “By documenting mortuary practices, we’re learning diverse ways of how people showcased their humanity.”
“Ritual plays important roles in social and religious life, yet can become contested, especially during periods of conquest in which new power relationships become established,” he added. “These finds reinforce how graves are one area where this conflict plays out.”
As archaeologists continue to study the Chincha Valley’s chullpas and the remarkable vertebrae-on-posts, the artifacts stand as silent but powerful testimony to Indigenous ingenuity and spiritual defiance. Far from passive victims of conquest, the people of the Chincha Valley actively sought to restore dignity to their ancestors—literally piecing together the fragments of a world upended by colonial violence.
This chilling yet profoundly human discovery may indeed prompt historians to reconsider the complex dynamics of cultural survival and adaptation during one of the most transformative—and destructive—periods in the Americas.