Machu Picchu was home not only to Inca royalty and other elite members, but also to their attendants and workers, many of whom lived in the city year-round. Some 750 people, including the emperor, lived on the site during the peak season between May and October. And not all of those residents were locals. A new study has revealed that most of the servants came from distant lands, from territories conquered by the Incas.
A team of researchers from Tulane University, led by archeology professor Jason Nesbitt, has analyzed for the first time the DNA of the people who inhabited the lost city located in the Cusco region, in the southeast of Cusco, more than 500 years ago. Peru.
The archaeological site, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and which receives thousands of visitors each year, was part of a royal property of the Inca Empire, which ruled the Andean area of South America from the early fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century, when the Spanish overthrew their power.
A century before the Spanish conquest, the Incas had built a huge palace high in the mountains of southern Peru, probably for Emperor Pachacuti, who reigned from 1438 to 1471. But even now little is known about the origins and lives of the servants who ran this hacienda.
To shed some light on the shadows, specialists have studied skeletons that were excavated and brought to Yale University in 1912. The Peruvian government claimed them for a long time, but they were not returned until 2012. That's when the door was opened. possibility of analyzing them, something that until then was impossible.
The results obtained by Nesbitt's team, as explained in an article published in the journal Science Advances, indicate a great diversity in the origins of servants. “These remains tell us about people of lower status, about the population of servants,” explains the Tulane archaeologist.
Many royals were cared for by men known as yanacona (probably from Quechua yanakuna, "slaves of the nobility"), who were not Incas. Usually they were brought from conquered lands and presented as gifts to the emperor. Women, known as "aclla", were also taken from their homes and given as wives to these male servants.
The yanacona and the aclla together attended to all the needs of the emperor, his guests and other personalities of the Inca Empire while they participated in banquets, songs, dances and hunts and performed important religious ceremonies.
The researchers compared the DNA of 34 individuals buried at Machu Picchu with that of 36 ancient and modern towns in the Urubamba Valley, also called the Sacred Valley, north of the Inca capital of Cusco, to see how closely they were related.
The analysis showed that those attendees came from all over the Andean highlands and the coast, some from as far away as the Amazon. Few of them shared genetics with each other, which shows that they had been brought to southern Peru individually and not as part of a family or community group.
"There's nothing in genetics that tells you these people were bred," Jason Nesbitt says. This data has been confirmed from the archaeological remains such as the simple and non-Inca style ceramics buried together with these individuals and the analysis of the historical information.
During the last century, the tombs of almost 200 people who died between the years 1420 and 1532 in Machu Picchu have been discovered. Graves that had been assumed to house the remains of the Yanacona and Aclla servants who tended the royal family. The recent analysis has found a significant difference: most of the men came from highland regions, while the women had much more diverse ancestry outside of the highlands.
