700-Year-Old Child's Remains Found in New Mexico May Be Result of Sacrifice Made by Sociopolitical Elites

Remains excavated in New Mexico have researchers taking a more in-depth into the reason children were often sacrificed in ancient times. An analysis of the remains, which date back to A.D. 1301-1397, revealed that the body buried at Paquimé was a child birthed by closely related parents, Newsweek reported. 

The remains were found by a team of archaeologists in the late 1950s and 1960s, at Paquimé, an archaeological site in the northwestern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Recently, radiocarbon dating and other tests revealed that the buried individual was a child aged two to five years old and lived between A.D. 1301 and 1397.

A group of researchers who studied the remains determined that the child may have been sacrificed by an elite family, as part of a tradition to consecrate a special building and grow their sociopolitical power, Newsweek reported.

"This is an important finding because archaeologists are still working to understand the social structure at Paquimé and what role (if any) ritual and religious leaders played there," said study lead author, Jakob Sedig with Harvard University, Newsweek reported.

From A.D. 1200 to 1450, Paquimé was considered the sociopolitical center of the Northwest/Southwest region and a hub of the pre-Hispanic (or pre-Columbian) Mogollon culture. For decades experts have been studying the site to understand the hierarchy that the society in those times followed, and the genetic makeup of the local population on the site.

"Ancient DNA data from Paquimé will be crucial for our understanding of how the people who lived in the ancient Northwest/Southwest interacted with one another," Sedig said, Newsweek reported.

Researchers believed that the child was a sacrifice because of how he was buried. He was placed beneath a roof support beam in a building that experts called House of the Well.

Considering the contents of the House of the Well building, the researchers concluded that it was the ceremonial center where all the important rituals took place. The fact that the child was buried in this location, implies that the individual was of an elite lineage.

The child's DNA analysis revealed that his parents were closely related and belonged to the same family tree.

"The data suggest his parents weren't as closely related as siblings but were more closely related than first cousins. They shared about 25-50 percent of genetic material. We could not determine the exact relationship of the child's parents, but they would have been half-siblings, aunt/uncle-niece/nephew, grandparent-grandchild, or some other similarly closely related pair," Sedig said, Newsweek reported. "We had no reason to suspect the child's parents were closely related."

In most societies of those times, marrying within the family was considered taboo. But in many groups, elites were not subject to such taboos and might have been allowed to form marital relations within the family, as per the experts. 

The authors believe that the child was sacrificed to consecrate a ritually important building, Newsweek reported. As per researchers, the child's genetic lineage, and the close relationship between the parents might be a reason behind the choosing of this individual as a sacrifice. 

"[The authors] argue that the close genetic relationship of the child's parents, revealed through this analysis, and the special depositional context of the burial reflects one family's attempts to consolidate and legitimize their social standing in this ancient community," the study abstract reads, Newsweek reported.

It is not clear how the child's sacrifice contributed to the building. Past research has shown that sacrifices played a huge role in Mesoamerican societies. 

"In other societies—for example, Maya and Aztec—elite sacrifice was especially powerful. We don't think this child's unique burial beneath a post—the only such burial we know of at the site—in a ritually significant building and with special grave goods was coincidental," Sedig said.

"There were other sacrificial victims at the site (in a building called the House of the Dead) who were not treated nearly as well as the child in our study. So it seems to us that there was something special, unique, and/or important about the child sacrifice in our paper."

Researchers are hopeful that further analysis of the child will reveal the genetic makeup of the local population on the site, Newsweek reported.