RITES OF REBELLION

Archaeologists unearth evidence of a 500-year-old resistance movement high in the Andes

- HUMBERTO BASILIO

THE FIRST MEMBER OF the team to unearth human bones at the site of Iglesiachayoq was Félix Huamani, a farmer who lives in the Chicha-Soras Valley of Peru's Ayacucho region. As he dug through the earth beneath a colonial-era church, he revealed a skull whose teeth and lower jaw were covered with a black soot-like substance. Huamani had just discovered what seemed to be the first archaeological evidence of an Andean resistance movement that arose in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest of 1532. Known as the Taki Onqoy, or the "dancing sickness" in the Quechua language, members of this religious and political movement were said by contemporaneous Spanish clerics to have exhumed their dead from beneath churches and reburied them according to Andean customs. The skull that Huamani had unearthed may be both the first physical evidence of such an act of rebellion and an example of how Andean people transformed Spanish burial customs by intertwining them with their own ritual practices.