JUAN DIEGO ORTIZ JIMENEZ
With the same fate as a bottle that is thrown into the sea with a message inside hoping that one day someone will read it, a group of archaeologists found a funerary urn on a mountain in Bolombolo with a baby inside, 1,640 years old, and many clues and voices in the puzzle that is always any past.
The discovery, which occurred during the construction of the 4G Pacífico 1 highway, excites the scientific community of Antioquia, because it is the first burial of its kind known in the region in a period located in the year 300 AD and because both the vessel funeral, the pieces and remains of a mother and her baby were complete.
The story is more or less like this: it turns out that preventive archeology programs are mandatory in the construction of any infrastructure work. These consist of field work to explore the territory, carry out excavations in specific areas and accompany the removal of soils during the construction of roads.
Covipacífico, the concessionaire in charge of the Pacífico 1 highway, which runs from Caldas to Bolombolo, implemented this protocol along the 50 kilometers of the highway, fortunately for Antioquian archeology that sites were identified that accounted for the societies that inhabited the Southwest in ancient periods.
They found houses, workshops to make rock tools, ceramic utensils, burials, bowls, clay handles and petroglyphs, which are rocks carved with figures and shapes. So, paleobotanical analyzes were carried out —what is known as the study of plant remains— to reconstruct what ancient environments were like, with carbon tests and DNA and provenance analyzes to find out where they got the raw materials to make the ceramics. In this game, each piece, no matter how tiny, can become the missing link to solve the puzzle.
Breshnev Villada Gómez, an archaeologist from the Arqueológicas company and in charge of the findings on the Pacífico 1 highway, prefers not to name these groups that inhabited the Southwest, because the nicknames of Muiscas or Zenufanáes are an inheritance from the Conquest or the Colony and surely those civilizations were never identified with those designations. That is why it rather highlights the pre-Hispanic richness and ethnic and multicultural diversity.
In any case, the human occupation found was segmented into various periods between the 3rd and 4th centuries, between the 7th and 9th centuries; and a period close to the Conquest. Some evidence of the Colony, the Republic and even of the successive waves of Antioquian Colonization in the 18th and 19th centuries even appeared in the polls.
But they were far from knowing the exciting meeting they would have in the middle of a plateau on the grounds of Bolombolo, in Venice.
The clues inside the bottle
During an archaeological monitoring on a hill, a burial began to be revealed. First they found the body of a person who had some broken pots to his right. Normally this is known as trousseau, someone’s jewelry and common belongings, elements that in the belief of the time accompany the dead in transit to other worlds.
To the left of the woman was a complete vessel that, according to its characteristics, resembled a funerary urn.
In Antioquia this type of burial is common, but normally cremated bone remains had been found inside the urns. of one or more individuals. Even an interpretation among experts of these issues is that the vessels simulated a womb in which the deceased was deposited, so that he might be reborn in another world.
In this case, narrates the archaeologist Villada Gómez, they assumed that this was what they were going to find, placing the burial between the 1st century BC. C. and the 7th century AD To determine it, they did a micro excavation to completely extract the vessel and took it to a laboratory because opening the lid in the open might contaminate or damage the evidence. What they found amazed everyone because inside was a complete infant body that was not subjected to fire, which was the usual practice for that period.
The body was complete with arms crossed and squatting, as it appears in the drawing by the artist Rikki Vélez accompanying the note. This was determined because the girl was placed inside the vessel and it filled with earth, which allowed the body to maintain its position. They removed the skull and then the arm and leg bones to begin testing.
The time of antiquity was the first thing to establish. The remains were packed and subjected to studies at the Beta Analytic laboratory in the United States to corroborate their age. The results marked that they were 1,640 years before the Present (aP).
This is a time reference used in archeology and other related disciplines that defined the present in the year 1950 to parameterize any finding. In other words, we are talking regarding a mother and a girl who walked in what is now Venice back in the 300s AD.
Later they established that the woman was between 30 and 40 years old, and that she was suffering from malnutrition problems, because she had marks on her bones that indicated diets of many grains and few proteins.
The girl, for her part, was between 9 and 12 months old and had reached minimal muscle and skeletal development, although she probably suffered from anemia because her teeth were purple, a diagnosis that was confirmed by a dental pathologist. She also had malformations on her left side.
Why were they buried next to each other? The archaeologist Villada Gómez responds that at first they thought that finding them together made them think they were family. To corroborate it, they did DNA analysis with geneticists and a mitochondrial study, to trace closeness to ancestors.
The results showed that they were mother and daughter and with that they unified clues to try to interpret a burial that was not common.
Scholars of pre-Columbian cultures have documented a pattern in coastal indigenous communities and it was that when a person on whom children depended died and there was no one to take care of it, they performed a sacrificial ritual and buried the minors with the mother or father. It is likely that this was the case of the mother and baby found on the Bolombolo hill, near the new road tunnel that was built in La Sinifaná.
“Our working hypothesis is that everything related to this burial, the physical condition, the funeral ritual, the elaboration of the vessels with a certain speed, leads us to indicate that the girl’s burial was different, because the community wanted her transit to another world did not intercede in the world of the living”, adds Villada.
The finding is important and excites the scientific community of Antioquia for several aspects. First, the story was reconstructed with genetic, radiocarbon, forensic evidence and specialized pathologists; In addition, it is the first burial of its type that is known in the region in this period located in the year 300 AD; and it was not the product of a guaquería or trafficking of parts, but was found within a context that allows us to continue putting together the puzzle of what was happening around, what the ground, the grave and the disposition of the dead were like more than 1,600 years ago .
It is a real luxury that can be seen in the future in a room that will be set up in the restored railway station in Bolombolo, once the protocols and verifications of the case are completed, as it is a discovery of this dimension.
“These pieces open up a new world of possibilities that were not previously identified, because what we are looking for in archeology is to establish patterns, regularities between periods, places and human groups. It is a novel finding that provides new data on the knowledge of the past, on the ancestry of thousands of years ago”, concludes the archaeologist Villada Gómez.
The Wayuu poet Vito Apüshana was right when he wrote that we grow, like trees, inside the traces of our ancestors, we dream there, between the Moon and the Sun, and we die as if we were still alive.
