Four mummies buried beside a Wari temple reopen the question of whether the Wari conquered the Nasca

Kellner's argument starts with a comparison. At Huaca del Loro the dead were buried in the cemetery, and these four were buried somewhere else. "That's typical for a lot of burials in Peru, but what makes these individuals so interesting is that we found them buried by a Wari temple and not in the cemetery like the rest," she said ^[5]. The layout of the bodies was typical for Peru, and their placement by the temple was the unusual part ^[5].

The published account does not say whether the four are thought to be local Nasca or people from the Wari heartland around Ayacucho ^[17]. In my view that is the question the interpretation hangs on. Wari incomers buried at a Wari shrine would fit a conquest account without difficulty. Local people given that place would fit Kellner's.

The lab work could narrow it. The first pass used X-rays. "When we first found these individuals, we were able to get X-rays and worked with a radiologist and a doctor to interpret the results," Kellner said ^[8]. This summer she spent five weeks in Peru with Melissa Lund, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, and Alexandra Oshiro, a graduate student there ^[15]. With permission from the Ministry of Culture, and help from Susana Arce, director of the Museo Nacional de Lima, where the mummies are kept, the team took them out of the museum for CT scans and DNA sampling ^[9].

The part of the design I like best is that they sampled the neighbours as well. "We also took samples from other people and animals found at the site, so that we could run isotopic analysis that will help us figure out diet, relationships and migration patterns," Kellner said ^[10]. Those samples are the control group. They let the team ask whether the four ate and moved like the people in the cemetery.

Kellner already has a working answer. "These findings make us think that the Wari and the Nasca had a previous relationship and that the Nasca civilization might have supported the Wari Empire," she said ^[13]. She suggests the tie may have run through ceramic technology, for which the Nasca are known, or through textiles and cotton ^[16]. The Wari settled in Ayacucho, high country where cotton might have been hard to grow. The Nasca lived at lower elevation, on land suited to cotton and coca ^[17].

Her stated aim goes beyond a yes-or-no verdict on conquest. "We are looking for colonization techniques to see if there was any type of resistance and to determine how complex their relationship was," she said ^[12]. I'd treat the cooperation reading as a hypothesis with a test attached. The test has not been run. Isotope analysis at NAU's Anthropology Isotope Paleodiet lab starts only after the DNA and CT results come back ^[14].