About 900 years in the past, a girl between 17 and 25 years outdated died and was buried close to the fashionable border of Chile and Argentina. But not like different individuals buried close by, she was entombed in a canoe.

The discovery—particulars of that are published in PLoS ONE—pushes the follow of formality canoe burial farther south in South America than was beforehand recognized. The archaeological staff suspects it was a symbolic technique of serving to the deceased journey to the afterlife.

“At first we did not understand what we saw, since it was something unknown for Patagonian Argentina,” mentioned Alberto Enrique Pérez, an archaeologist on the Universidad Católica de Temuco in Chile and the research’s lead creator, in an electronic mail to Gizmodo. “We were pleasantly surprised.”

The canoe burial emerged throughout excavations between 2012 and 2015 at Newen Antug, an archaeological website within the Patagonian foothills. The website sits on the outskirts of San Martín de los Andes, throughout the road from some inns. Newen Antug is about half a mile from a lake, which the research authors suppose could also be related to the symbolic burial technique.

The girl is named Individual 3; two different human our bodies have been beforehand discovered at the identical website. Those stays are more moderen, courting to round 1482 CE, they usually weren’t buried in canoes. Pérez mentioned that Individuals 1 and a couple of have been possible killed by the Spanish, as evidenced by trauma on their skeletons and amputated limbs.

Individual 3 dates to about 1142 CE—earlier than the Spanish arrived in South America—and she or he was between 17 and 25 years outdated when she died, although the researchers aren’t positive what ended her life. A big jug was positioned subsequent to her head. Though a lot of the canoe (or wampo) across the physique had rotted away, practically 600 fragments of wooden nonetheless remained.

Looking on the fragments underneath a microscope, the staff decided that the wooden was Chilean cedar, and a few of it was charred. That lends credence to the belief that it was as soon as a canoe, as historic accounts element Indigenous South Americans making dugout canoes by burning away the inside wooden. Though the follow is well-known in Chile, that is the primary proof of it in Argentina. It’s additionally the southernmost recognized canoe burial in South America.

“Historical sources refer more to burials in wampo or trolof [wooden canoes] among male individuals, but that is more recent,” Pérez mentioned. “The Newen Antug find may show that it was a more widespread practice amongst both genders.”

The canoe burial is believed to represent the voyage the deceased takes to their final resting place. Ship burials on land have been frequent in different cultures as properly, maybe most famously amongst the Vikings.

Since the ancestors of the Indigenous Mapuche individuals of Chile and Argentina typically inhabited shores, the research authors imagine the traditional girl’s canoe burial could also be tied to the significance of water in her life.

But any connection between this girl and the 2 people buried close by some 200 years later is unclear, for now. But the staff hopes that the latest discovery conjures up extra investigation of the ancestors of contemporary Mapuche individuals and their tradition.

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