Ancient Headless Skeletons Found in Island Grave

I believe I posted this before, but apparently did not go through. If
this is a duplicate ignore it.

The most important information contained is the existence of four
people in the 3,000 year old burial who have lived on a "terrestrial"
diet vice the Lapita seafood diet. They are buried differently and one
has three skulls on his chest.


Ancient Headless Skeletons Found in Island Grave

By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer



More than fifty headless skeletons have been unearthed in one of the
oldest Pacific Islander cemeteries in the world.

The individuals were members of a socially complex society, traveling
between islands hundreds of miles away, a new study suggests.

The finding could solve a long-held debate over whether the Lapita
people, thought to be ancestors of the Polynesians, were isolated on
individual islands or interacted with other distant Lapita tribes to
find marriage partners, exchange information and maintain social ties.
Results, detailed in the October issue of the journal American
Antiquity, paint a picture of the ancient people as expert seafarers.

"The real question is did they live in isolation or did they keep in
communication with the islands that might have been further back in
their ancestry, because they generally spread from west to east across
the Pacific," said lead author Alex Bentley, an anthropologist at
Durham University in the UK.

The 3,000-year-old skeletons were uncovered in 2003 at an
archaeological site on Efate Island, part of Vanuatu in the South
Pacific. None of the buried individuals had a skull attached to the
skeleton, though one male was adorned with three skulls lying on his
chest.

Though archaeologists over the past 50 years or so have discovered
more than 200 Lapita sites, until now these had yielded just 15 to 20
individuals. Finding a graveyard of tens of skeletons could yield a
trove of insights into how these people lived.

"This site is that much more extraordinary due to the fact that it is
the earliest and by far the largest cemetery ever found in the
Pacific," said study researcher Stuart Bedford of the Australian
National University. "The excellent preservation and large number of
burials, now up to 60 individuals, is giving us a first real chance to
study this early colonizing population."

Grave analyses

Bentley and his colleagues analyzed chemical isotopes from the teeth
of 17 of the buried, headless skeletons. Relative abundances of
certain isotopes signify where the people lived, broadly speaking, and
their diet. For instance, oxygen isotope levels change with
temperature and altitude.

The researchers found four Lapita individuals who were buried facing
south, unlike the others, and whose isotope levels were significantly
different from the others, possibly indicating a small group of
immigrants who traveled from hundreds of miles away, Bentley said.
These individuals had isotope levels that matched a more terrestrial
diet, as opposed to the marine foods eaten by the other islanders
buried.

"There's no way they could be from East Asia. Most likely they were
from maybe as far away as New Guinea," Bentley told LiveScience. "The
Lapita expansion had already reached New Guinea by the time Vanuatu
was settled."

Ancient travelers

One male, called TEO 10E, was buried with three skulls on his chest
and was himself one of the "immigrants," though the skulls on his
chest were of the local community. The Lapita initially buried the
deceased with heads attached, and only later after the flesh had
rotted away did they dig up the graves and remove the skulls, which
were kept in shrines or other sacred places.

"It is a sign of veneration of the senior individual. The skulls of
all those buried were removed during the mortuary process and
presumably curated somewhere," Bedford said. "Upon the death and
burial of TEO 10E, these three skulls were retrieved and placed on his
chest."

The fact that the locals were buried alongside the traveling
immigrants could imply utmost respect among Lapita.

"The curious burials among the identified group of prehistoric Pacific
mariners, who were among the best navigators on earth for the next
3,000 years, indicate they were admired by the locals for their
amazing long-distance traveling abilities," Bentley said.

He added, "Maybe these guys were maintaining specific contacts with
specific other communities as opposed to just coming in willy-nilly
from here and there."

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