Abstract:
The results of all forms of skeletal trauma in a diachronic sequence of 3,100 skeletal
individuals from Lambayeque, Peru present insight into social, political, ideological, and
environmental changes in pre-Hispanic and postcontact era. These native peoples lived
and died between 2800 BCE-1750CE – from the dawn of early social complexity to the
rise of large-scale states and the era of Spanish colonization. Through analysis of skeletal
trauma prevalence between pre-Hispanic and postcontact era along with analysis of sex
differentiation and cut mark prevalence allows for the presentation of a holistic trauma
study. This work quantified bone fractures, blunt force injuries, interpersonal trauma,
activity based injuries, and sharp force trauma. Prevalence differences were evaluated
using odds ratio analyses comparing trauma across the Formative era, development of
pre-Hispanic states, and the Colonial period. Our results lead us to reject all but one of
the hypotheses. The only exception involves evidence of large-scale late pre-Hispanic
sacrificial violence. The near lack of accident-related injuries and other skeletal trauma
likely reflects the minimally hazardous regional topography, influence of structural
violence, and use of sacrifice in a social hierarchy. The rarity of interpersonal injuries
speaks to mechanisms besides institutionalized violence to integrate peoples in the states
of late prehistory. Following Spanish conquest, trauma declines in the Lambayeque
skeletal record. While many lines of evidence describe embedded patterns of Colonial-era
violence (labor extraction, structural violence, racism, coercive socioecoomic structures),
these forces evidently only very rarely broke bones.
