Witch Hill, Panama: No one knows why a girl was buried face down in an abandoned city 700 years ago [View all]

The ritual burial was found at a site that hadn't been inhabited for 150 years.
By Staff Reporter
June 2, 2017 17:36 BST


About 700 years ago a teenager was buried in western Panama at a site known as Cerro Brujo, or Witch Hill. The burial is particularly puzzling because the city she was buried in had been abandoned for about 150 years.

The girl is thought to have been between 14 and 16 when she died. She had bone cancer in her upper arm, the likely cause of her death. The discovery makes hers the earliest case of cancer found in Latin America to date. The research was published in a paper in the International Journal of Palaeopathology.

The settlement where she was found had a troubled history. Witch Hill was first abandoned around the year 600, when the nearby Volcán Barú erupted. It was inhabited a second time between about 780 and 1252, and then deserted again. The area where the girl was discovered wasn't inhabited for longer than that.

"Based on the analysis of a tooth from the individual, we think he or she was buried about 150 years after the settlement was abandoned," said study author Nicole Smith-Guzmán of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

More:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/witch-hill-panama-no-one-knows-why-girl-was-buried-face-down-abandoned-city-700-years-ago-1624532