Miscellany

In 2020 bioarchaeologists found evidence that six individuals buried in southern Peru’s Chincha Valley during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries began their lives hundreds of miles away, on the country’s upper coast. The findings support colonists’ descriptions of the Incan Empire forcibly resettling populations to quell dissent and increase the procurement of natural resources. “The state generally sought to put people in ecological zones similar to their home,” the researchers noted, and the Chincha Valley would have been “a prime destination for the resettlement of northern water-management specialists and miners.”