An international team of researchers discovered a perfectly preserved set of tropical parrot feathers inside an extraordinary dry grave in Pachacamac. The team then sequenced the feathers’ DNA and found that they likely came from four species of wild-type tropical parrots. Furthermore, further chemical research revealed that these parrots lived in captivity near the coast – neither their natural habitat nor where the feathers were recovered. The findings were published today in Nature Communications.
“Our study reveals human ingenuity and drive to solve the physical and logistical challenges of obtaining desired objects across large distances: across the Andes long before the emergence of the mighty Inca Empire,” Izumi Shimada, the study’s senior author and retired anthropologist at Southern Illinois University, told Gizmodo.
feathers in dry land
In the early 2000s, Shimada directed the Pachamac Archaeological Project, which discovered a very large, intact burial chamber belonging to an elite member of the Yascha Empire, a pre-Inca society between 1100 and 1460. Of the 35 funerary bundles found by the team, five contained colorful bird feather ornaments.
It was an “ecological anomaly” that inspired the latest project, George Olah, lead author of the study and an interdisciplinary geneticist at the Australian National University, told Gizmodo.
“It has long been known that the colorful plumage of Amazonian parrots was highly valued in ancient cultures throughout the Americas,” Shimada said. “However, questions such as the exact identity of the birds, their origin, how the feathers were obtained and who was involved in their trade remain to be answered.”
Nomadic lifestyle of an old parrot
First, the team tried to identify which parrot the feathers came from. DNA sequencing of the ancient feathers identified four species: the scarlet macaw, the red-and-green macaw, the blue-and-yellow macaw, and the mealy amazon – all native to lowland tropical forests on the opposite side of the Andes as the Yasma Kingdom.
Furthermore, the high genetic diversity among specimens indicates that these parrots originated in the wild. But the strangeness did not end here. When the team reconstructed the parrot’s diet using isotope chemistry, they found high carbon content in things like corn, Shimada said, which suggested the birds had a coastal diet.
keep an eye on parrot road
The team suspected that “these birds were caught wild in the rainforest, transported alive to the Andes, and kept in captivity somewhere on the Pacific coast,” Ola explained. He added, “We’ve moved from simply identifying a species in the archaeological record to actually tracking their travel and diet in completely different ecosystems.”
To confirm their hypothesis, the team used a spatial model to map the possible routes that surviving parrots could have taken from the Amazon rainforest to Yasma. This exercise presented two possibilities: a northern route to the northern coast of Peru, across the Chimú Empire, contemporary to Yeshama; Or a “physically more challenging route” eastward through the Andes to Pachamac, Shimada said.
“Archaeological evidence supports the former scenario,” he said. “Regardless of which route was taken, our study reveals both a complex economy and long-distance trade in the Yeshama culture, which long predated the Incan Empire.”
an unknown area of history
Most importantly, the new findings challenge a certain “Inca-centric view” of South American history, Ola explained. The general academic consensus until now has been that these pre-Inca societies were more isolated, but the study challenged that view, demonstrating that they were actually “managing highly sophisticated, long-distance logistics networks.”
Actually, it’s one thing to want vibrant, exotic feathers; It’s another to have “the ingenuity and drive to solve physical and logistical challenges,” Shimada said. In a broader sense, the findings “also shed light on the many well-preserved pre-Hispanic feather artifacts stored in various museums in Peru and Chile that await our attention,” he said.
“The ancient world was much more interconnected than we imagined,” Ola concludes. “Understanding how ancient societies used, managed and traded these iconic species gives us a deeper baseline for how we manage and conserve them today against modern anthropogenic threats.”
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