Dozens of graves buried with llamas in Chile reveal an ancient connection.

A few decades before Diego de Almagro and his men arrived in 1536 at what would later become La Serena (northern Chile), the inhabitants of the Elqui River Valley were still buried with llamas that seemed to embrace them. Now, a multidisciplinary study has examined the remains of the camelids. From their bones to their genes, including the tartar on their teeth, it has been shown that the animals were domesticated. They began burying them together around the year 1000 AD and stopped doing so when the Incas , who considered the llama a mere beast of burden, began burying their relatives in those shared graves.

In 2014, when the Pan-American Highway was to be doubled, workers found human remains. An excavation began before progress erased history. The Chilean National Monuments Council protected an area measuring 380 meters by 50 meters. This was the area surveyed by archaeologist Paola González's team from the El Olivar Foundation, named after the site they had just discovered. "An archaeological rescue was carried out between 2015 and 2017 in two of the eight burial areas detected," says the researcher. They removed five containers containing 1,500 boxes of material. The most significant remains were 56 camelids and more than 200 human bodies. They still have years to analyze everything.

One of the first fruits of El Olivar, located four kilometers north of La Serena and 2,500 meters from the Pacific Ocean, has been the study of camelids buried with humans. "The big question was whether they were domestic or wild animals, in this case the guanaco, because our area does have a large number of guanacos in the wild," says González. Science considers it proven that llamas ( Lama glama ) descend from the guanaco ( Lama guanicoe ) and that there were several domestication processes in various Andean regions.

The first thing they did was analyze the animals' bones. During the domestication process, the llamas shrank in size compared to the guanacos. "But it wasn't conclusive," says the archaeologist. They then followed up with an isotopic analysis of the bones, an indirect method for determining what people ate in the past . The relationship between elements like nitrogen and carbon revealed that they had a mixed diet, based on wild plants, "but also on C4 plants, a chemical indicator typical of corn," adds González. But that didn't seem like definitive proof, so they continued, now, looking for pathologies. "Some of these animals had a disease called polydactyly, which means they have an extra toe [llamas are artiodactyls, meaning they have two toes on their hooves]. This causes them to be crippled animals, but they survived to adulthood," the researcher explains. Only a domestic animal from which wool is obtained, but crippled, would still be valuable enough to survive.

Even so, they performed two more tests. One was to search the tartar on the teeth for traces of their diet. Previous studies had already shown that fossilized tartar bacteria can be a window to the past; the other was a genetic analysis. They found remains of corn and squash. “The archaeobotanical experts confirmed that the squash was boiled, so they were giving it to them like porridge,” González explains. The final test, the genetic analysis, was performed by Michael Westbury, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and co-author of the study. It was definitive proof. “He determined that these little animals were Guanicoe chilensis , which, while it has a wild version, was also domesticated at a certain time,” the archaeologist explains. The most significant thing is that they didn't exist in the region. "They don't come from the semi-arid northern region of Chile, but rather from much further north, from the Bolivian highlands or areas of Peru. What's interesting is that these llamas didn't arrive alone, but rather, what is already clear to me, was the arrival of a population of highland shepherds," he concludes. It was these shepherds who brought the practice of being buried alongside their llamas.

Patricio López, from the Atacama Desert Natural and Cultural History Museum (Chile) and first author of the new study, maintains that "there is no information to support a local domestication process." Although he does not rule out the possibility of an in situ process, they would need to review a time sequence of several thousand years, which is what would have been needed to complete the process. "In the particular case of El Olivar, the presence of domesticated camelids, in this case llamas, is possibly associated with an exchange of knowledge and information with groups from northern Chile and/or northwestern Argentina," he adds in an email.

Determining the domestic status of the llamas and their origin is key to better understanding these joint burials. According to radiocarbon dating, they began around 1090. The first thing that caught the archaeologists' attention was the arrangement of the bodies, both human and animal, in a lateral fetal position, as if lying down. "They look at each other, and between human and camelid, they describe these symmetrical figures; the position is completely non-anatomical, that is, no camelid assumes this flexed lateral cubit position, identical to that of a human when it dies," recalls archaeologist Paola González. For her, "they are marking some sort of fusion of identities, of accompaniment; if we look for something to assimilate it with, I would say it is accompanying the human being in this transition," she adds. Although she recalls that archaeology cannot definitively establish things that can only be glimpsed, "there is a very noticeable effort to humanize the human-camelid relationship."

When the Incas conquered the territory (between 1440 and 1470, according to various dates), the burial of llamas and humans ceased. The Incas used them as pack animals, and they probably didn't hold the same symbolism they did for the inhabitants of El Olivar. In fact, they buried their dead in sistas, a type of sarcophagus placed on top of the old shared tombs.

Although there are records of animal burials, especially dogs, or mummification, as was done in ancient Egypt , in other cultures of the past, there are hardly any cases of joint burials. And the few that do exist are of some prominent figure buried with horses or in sacrificial events . Nothing like El Olivar. And the 56 llamas recovered in El Olivar are not the only ones. There are still several areas to be unearthed, and fortunately, the Chilean government ended up rerouting the highway.