Joint UCSC study provides insights into ancient Incan society

Residents were forcefully relocated



Ruins of stone houses and other structures at Machu Picchu, northwest of Cuzco, Peru. (AP Photo/Shirley Salemy Meyer)

By ARIC SLEEPER | asleeper@santacruzsentinel.com |
PUBLISHED: July 29, 2023 at 1:15 p.m. | UPDATED: July 29, 2023 at 1:28 p.m.

SANTA CRUZ — A recently published study, co-authored by UC Santa Cruz Anthropology Professor Lars Fehren-Schmitz, analyzing the 500 year-old DNA of those buried near Peru’s iconic Incan citadel Machu Picchu, shows that the servant class that lived and died there — forcefully relocated to the structure by the Incan empire — hailed from more diverse backgrounds than scientists had anticipated.

“The people that we are actually looking at are servants to the royal family,” said Fehren-Schmitz. “The Inca had a very complex system of forced relocation that they also used to control the places that they occupied and to maintain their political relationships.”

The recently published study, titled “Insights into the genetic histories and lifeways of Machu Picchu’s occupants,” was conducted over a 12-year span, and included researchers from Yale, Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco, Tulane University, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in addition to UCSC and was made possible through an agreement between Yale, the State of Peru, and the University of Cusco to return artifacts and human remains from the Hiram Bingham Expedition collection back to Peru.

Fehren-Schmitz, whose expertise lies in archeology and genetics, and is also the associate director of the UCSC Genomics Institute, has been working on the Machu Picchu study from the beginning. More than a decade ago, while finishing up his doctorate in his home nation of Germany, he attended a conference in Lima, Peru, where he met Yale Anthropology Professor Richard Burger, who inspired the idea of the study and is also a co-author.

“At that time, Yale was involved in negotiations with the State of Peru to return all the artifacts and human remains from the Hiram Bingham excavations in Peru,” said Fehren-Schmitz. “He offered me to come over as a postdoc to help with the human remains of the repatriation to Peru.

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https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/07/29/joint-ucsc-study-provides-insights-into-ancient-incan-society/