UC Merced

Mortuary practices deeply affect the living as they reflect how the living view death and how the dead re-member the identity of the living. Within the Andes, there was a continuity of mortuary practice that endured from the Middle Horizon (650-1000 CE) to the Late Horizon (1438-1532 CE), creating and maintaining a memory of death, life, and identity. When the Spanish colonized the Andes, they introduced Catholicism and structures that forced local Andeans to accept the religion – and concomitantly, their specific mortuary practices. Catholicism was a substantial disruption to the mortuary ritual that had been sustained for centuries. However, when confronted with Catholicism and its mortuary practice, local Andean groups had varied responses encompassing a spectrum from acceptance to resistance including participation in the Taki Onqoy revitalization movement. Taki Onqoy was a cultural revitalization movement that preached for traditional huacas to defeat the Spanish God. The site of Iglesiachayoq (Ayacucho), an Inka settlement in the Chicha-Soras Valley of Peru, was identified by Cristóbal Albornoz as a center of Taki Onqoy. The site was excavated in 2015 and subsequent analysis of materials took place in 2016 to investigate Taki Onqoy as a cultural revitalization movement through material remains. A MNI of 21 individuals were uncovered during this excavation. I use mortuary, skeletal and isotopic analyses on the burials from Iglesiachayoq to address questions about the relationship between indigenous and Spanish actors during the colonial moment. Graves were assessed for structure, grave goods and body positioning, while the human remains were analyzed for information related to demography, paleodiet and mobility These individuals and their graves demonstrate a wide spectrum of responses to the Spanish presence from acceptance of Catholicism to resistance by practicing Taki Onqoy, but I find that most individuals were in-between, indicating the negotiated nature of identity during the Early Colonial Period at Iglesiachayoq.