14 DAY TRIAL // This is like finding the tomb of Jesus: archaeologists have discovered the oldest gunshot victim amongst Native Americans, nearly 500 years old.
"We didn't expect it. We saw this skull and saw the almost round hole and thought people must have been shooting around here recently. But the skull was ancient, and a recent bullet strike would simply have shattered it," said Guillermo Cock, who discovered the remains near Lima, Peru.
The skull was found in a large group of bones of ancient Incas, who faced a violent death in the early 1500s, during the Spanish Conquista of the Inca Empire. The bones placed in shallow graves revealed a hasty burial during a conflict, maybe an uprising against the Spanish in 1536.
To be sure this was a gunshot wound - making it the earliest one documented in the Americas - the skull was studied by forensics expert Tim Palmbach at the University of New Haven, who brought in other experts.
"The team tried to rule out all kinds of causes of the hole - a rock from a slingshot, spear, sledgehammer. We all thought it was a million-to-one chance that we would find any traces of metal on a skull that old, but it was worth a try," Al Harper, director of the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science in New Haven, Connecticut, declared.
But a powerful scanning electronic microscope revealed that metal fragments from a musket ball impregnated the area around the hole. The burials were found in 2004 and by now 72 bodies have been recovered.
"These bodies were strangely buried. They were not facing the right direction, they were tied up or hastily wrapped in a simple cloth, they had no offerings and they were buried at a shallow depth. Some of the bodies also showed signs of terrible violence. They had been hacked, torn, impaled - injuries that looked as if they had been caused by iron weapons - and several had injuries on their heads and faces that looked as if they were caused by gunshots. One skull in particular had both an entrance and exit wound, suggestive of a musket ball and prompting him to seek experts to study it. A plug of bone from one of the holes was recovered nearby" said Cock.
The result clearly showed that a musket ball less than an inch in diameter struck the back of the skull.
"This conclusively proves that the person was killed by a gunshot, and he is the first identified shooting victim in the Americas," Cock said.
At least another two other apparent gunshot victims seem to be amongst the recovered bodies. In 2002, Cock discovered over 2,000 Inca mummies buried beneath a shantytown near Lima, which offered a lot of information on the life, health and culture of the Inca.