Patterns of trauma across Andean South America: New discoveries and advances in interpretation

In his review article John W. Verano covered trauma, warfare, trophy taking, and human sacrifice, but his discussion mostly focused on the results of studies of museum or private collections and the recent discovery of the mass human sacrifice from Huaca de la Luna. Due to the renewed interest in the paleopathology of South America, a trend which Verano observed, these types of investigations have grown exponentially in the past twenty years since his initial publication. Here we synthesize the published data on the study and interpretation of traumatic injuries across time and space and we tease out some of the themes that have emerged in the twenty odd years since the seminal paper written by Verano. We searched and analyzed publications from 1997 to 2017 that pertained specifically to Andean South America through the review of library databases and then narrowed our search to trauma-related topics. In our literature review and meta-analysis of published studies on traumatic injuries, we found that nearly one-third of publications related to the field of paleopathology in Andean South America dealt with subjects we classified under trauma (N = 116/378), such as trephination, violence, sacrifice, warfare, etc. Large sample sizes, population-focused research, advances in methods of analysis, and hypothesis driven investigations have led to sophisticated and nuanced interpretations along a wide range of themes so that we understand a great deal more about violence, sacrifice, trephination, warfare and their sociopolitical and environmental contexts in prehistoric and early colonial Andean South America.