Skeletons of the Inca Rebellion (Full Episode) - SPECIAL
Skeletons of the Inca Rebellion (Full Episode) - SPECIAL
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00:00 In Lima, Peru, bodies emerge from the sand.
00:08 Their wounds are horrific.
00:10 This person died a very violent death.
00:14 These skeletons may revolutionize our understanding of one of the pivotal events of world history,
00:23 the Spanish conquest of the Inca.
00:40 Twenty-first century Lima is a teeming city of nine million.
00:47 But beneath its sprawling shantytowns lie layer upon layer of Peru's ancient dead.
01:10 For over 20 years, Peruvian archaeologist and National Geographic grantee, Guillermo
01:17 has been working to unravel the mysteries of these Indian grave sites.
01:24 Nobody knows more about the ancient burials of Lima.
01:35 At the beginning of March of 2004, the city was going to open a new highway in the area
01:41 that we suspected that had a cemetery.
01:45 Now, we decided to put a trench in order to test if was or wasn't a cemetery.
01:54 The site Guillermo was investigating was an apparently unremarkable hillside in a suburb
01:59 of Lima called Puruchuco.
02:04 He set to work with his colleague of many years, archaeologist Elena Goicoechea.
02:14 Very quickly, their test trench yielded results.
02:22 The result of the test was about 20 graves in a trench that was 2 by 8 meters.
02:31 That finding led us to conclude that that little ravine was in fact a cemetery.
02:49 At first, the Puruchuco graveyard seemed very similar to others Willie and Elena had excavated.
02:59 Cemeteries were buried at regular intervals in a crouched sitting position facing the
03:03 rising sun.
03:06 This is the classic pattern of Inca burials.
03:13 But before long, strange anomalies began to appear.
03:24 Very soon, when we were into the excavation, we noticed that there was a number of individuals
03:29 that they didn't conform to the standard, to what we may call the burial pattern.
03:37 In the lower layers of the cemetery, everything seemed to be as Willie would expect in a well-organized
03:43 Inca graveyard.
03:45 But on top of these was a layer of bodies buried near the surface, which was like nothing
03:51 he or Elena had ever seen.
03:57 The body is stretched out this way, facing west.
04:01 Normally, it should be facing that direction, east.
04:06 The orientation is all wrong, just like the others.
04:13 The more they uncovered, the more surprises they found.
04:18 On top of the corpses of the traditional Inca graveyard, bodies had been thrown in chaotically.
04:33 Instead of the usual careful wrapping of the body with cotton stuffing and woolen fabrics,
04:39 these had been hastily wrapped in simple cloths called telas.
04:44 They were stretched on their side or back, some faced up, some to the west.
04:50 None were crouched and facing east in the traditional Inca way.
04:55 It was evident that they didn't follow the burial ritual.
04:58 They were without the proper offerings.
05:04 The question is why these individuals have been buried in such an unusual way.
05:10 To someone who knows the Inca world as well as Willie and Elena, this was mystifying.
05:17 Reverence for the dead was at the core of Inca culture.
05:22 Properly performed death rituals were crucial to ensuring the rebirth of the dead in the
05:27 spirit world.
05:29 Hence their burial in a crouched expectant pose, facing the sunrise, symbol of rebirth.
05:40 Against this backdrop, the treatment of the bodies at Puruchuko was doubly surprising.
05:49 It's as if the moment they died, they just wrapped them in a cloth, brought them to the
05:53 cemetery and stuck them in the ground chaotically, not the usual Inca way.
05:59 When Willie and his team unwrapped the loosely covered skeletons, what they found was even
06:05 more shocking.
06:08 It all bore marks of extreme violence.
06:13 Skulls had been crushed and some showed injuries that had never been seen before in an Inca
06:18 cemetery.
06:19 In fact, in any Indian cemetery anywhere in Central or South America.
06:27 One skeleton in particular really caught their attention.
06:31 They called him Mochito, the severed one, because of his horrific injuries.
06:39 The left middle and ring finger on the left hand had been perhaps cut off or twisted off.
06:47 He's clearly received some sort of blow to the face, a perimortem fracture to the left
06:52 first rib, a pretty bad break to the proximal femur.
06:57 All of these injuries together lead me to believe that this individual died a very violent
07:01 death.
07:04 Melissa Murphy is a bioarchaeologist working with Willie to interpret Mochito's injuries.
07:11 This is a very exceptional skeleton for a number of reasons.
07:15 He's very atypical.
07:16 He has a series of perimortem injuries that I haven't encountered before, in particular
07:22 these three quadrangular defects to his cranium.
07:26 One of the defects also has a small radiating fracture, a hinging fracture, that it looks
07:31 like something caught the outer table of this bone.
07:36 I've never encountered this, and based on documented cases of other injuries, it seems
07:41 consistent with metal-edged weaponry, something else but not something you would see among
07:49 Inca weapons.
07:51 The Inca had few weapons capable of delivering the clean, piercing wounds Melissa sees in
07:56 Mochito's remains.
07:58 Their deadliest weapons of war were stone clubs, spears, and slings.
08:06 The type of weaponry used by Inca warriors had been obsolete in Europe for over 2,000
08:15 years.
08:17 The arrival of Pizarro and his conquistadors in 1532 brought this Inca army and its stone
08:24 weapons face to face with 16th century Europe's most advanced military technology.
08:35 It was only 40 years since Christopher Columbus had claimed his first discoveries in the New
08:41 World for Spain.
08:45 The strange wounds on the top of Mochito's skull made Willie and his team think of stab
08:51 wounds delivered from horseback.
08:56 Could the bodies in the graveyard be victims of Pizarro's conquistadors?
09:03 If so, they would be the first ever found.
09:13 The injury to another skull seemed to prove the link to the conquistadors in an even more
09:19 dramatic way.
09:21 What's especially anomalous about it is that it has a large circular defect on the left
09:27 parietal that looks suspiciously like a gunshot wound.
09:32 And it looks like as the projectile exited the face and exited this area, it came apart
09:38 and the entire face was fragmented.
09:41 What's especially exceptional about this is not only that we have in fact the entrance
09:48 wound and the exit wound that I just showed you, but also that I recovered the plug of
09:53 bone that actually was in this position on the inside of the skull.
10:00 This could be a momentous discovery.
10:04 It would be the first documented gunshot wound in the New World.
10:16 The primitive but deadly 16th century guns called arquebuses were just one of the many
10:22 terrifying novelties the Spanish brought with them to South America.
10:28 The combination of guns, steel weapons and cavalry had a devastating effect on native
10:34 armies.
10:35 The Inca had no defense against any of them.
10:40 And there was yet another deadly cargo brought by the Spanish which would eventually decimate
10:44 the Inca population.
10:47 Disease.
10:49 But no one is sure exactly when the first epidemics arrived, so Willie's team concentrate
10:55 their efforts on the more obvious injuries to the skeletons.
11:02 If the suspected gunshot wound is real, it would be unprecedented.
11:08 So Melissa needs proof.
11:12 She hopes that x-rays might reveal traces of metal around the edges of the wound.
11:19 Here we're seeing really where the exit wound was and we're really expecting to see metal
11:23 residues, really bright white that's distinct from the bone and the teeth in the bone.
11:30 But we don't, there's nothing, there's nothing in there that suggests that there's lead or
11:36 metal residues.
11:37 Looks like no.
11:41 The negative result is a blow.
11:44 To Melissa and Willie, the wound clearly suggests a gunshot.
11:49 They just can't prove it.
11:51 Perhaps the metal traces left by the musket ball were too minuscule for the x-rays to
11:56 detect.
11:57 So Willie decides on a bold course of action.
12:02 He calls on one of the world's foremost crime labs.
12:05 It is 4,000 miles away at the University of New Haven in Connecticut.
12:12 With cutting edge forensic techniques, if any place can get some results from the skeletons
12:17 of Puruchuko, it is here.
12:20 Top forensic scientists Al Harper and Tim Palmbach have examined hundreds of gunshot
12:27 wounds, a lot fresher than the one in Peru.
12:36 Before long, Al and Tim are in Lima.
12:39 The lure of examining what may be the first gunshot wound in the Americas is irresistible.
12:45 Dr. Kroc?
12:46 Hi.
12:47 Good morning.
12:48 Welcome to our lab.
12:49 Albert Harper, how are you?
12:50 Good.
12:51 Very nice to meet you.
12:52 Lab, no?
12:53 It's a...
12:54 Very interesting.
12:55 Come in.
12:56 Very interesting.
12:57 Willie's lab contains the remains of over 3,000 Inca burials.
13:03 Work on this astonishing collection of mummies and skeletons has been temporarily abandoned
13:08 as Mochito and his band take center stage.
13:17 Al and Tim immediately focus on what Melissa thought might be the gunshot wound.
13:22 Oh, how interesting.
13:24 Look at this.
13:27 It's almost as if they're two separate entrances.
13:32 You had...
13:33 You almost did have a trajectory line of 30, 45 degrees.
13:36 It's hitting at some angle about like that.
13:38 So if we think energy-wise, it's got to be sufficient enough to pop a hole through the
13:43 cranium but not so energetic that you bust this up.
13:49 I mean, if you took a modern 14, 1500 foot energy impact of a normal handgun, you don't
13:57 get plugs like that.
13:58 There's a fragment there.
13:59 No, they're completely and totally fragmented.
14:00 The little pieces of...
14:02 The bullet simply punches a hole through the bone and it fragments the pieces of bone as
14:07 it goes through.
14:09 This isn't the case here.
14:11 The intact plug of bone indicates an impact much less forceful than any modern gunshot.
14:20 But it might well correspond to the much weaker impact of a 16th century octopus.
14:27 In fact, the bone plug itself carries a concave imprint highly suggestive of a musket ball.
14:34 Remarkable.
14:35 Absolutely remarkable.
14:37 Could this be a gunshot?
14:38 It could be.
14:41 To prove it, they'll have to use more sophisticated instruments, starting with a scanning electron
14:47 microscope or SEM.
14:49 What we want to try to do here is we'll do some scanning electron microscopy looking
14:53 at this.
14:54 And then if we find some small particulate matter, we can go ahead and we'll hit it with
14:58 an X-ray and that'll give us the elemental compositions.
15:01 All the inside surface there.
15:05 The results go beyond their wildest dreams.
15:10 The edges of the hole in the skull and the entire surface of the bone plug are impregnated
15:16 with fragments of iron, a metal sometimes used for Spanish musket balls.
15:24 Standard X-ray procedures fail to see these iron particles because what ultimately we
15:30 establish through the SEM is that these were very small particles that were actually hidden
15:36 in these small fissures and fractures in the bone.
15:40 Now Tim and Al have an image of what probably happened.
15:50 As the musket ball punched into the back of the skull and passed through the head, it
15:54 left iron fragments deep inside the bone, which had stayed there for 500 years.
16:03 Honestly, when we were first confronted with the possibility that there was a gunshot wound
16:08 some 500 years ago, we were skeptical.
16:13 And as any scientist would do, we sought to disprove that.
16:18 Simply, there's nothing that we have found or evaluated that is inconsistent with that
16:27 having been indeed a gunshot wound.
16:34 It's a remarkable discovery.
16:37 Not only the first evidence of a gunshot wound in the Americas, but support for Willey's
16:43 belief that the bodies from the Puruchuko graveyard could be the first ever forensic
16:49 remains of the battles of the conquest.
16:56 The questions posed by these precious bones are tantalizing.
17:02 What other stories do they have to tell?
17:07 Who was Mochito?
17:10 How did he and his people die?
17:17 As forensic science opens a window on the Spanish conquest of Peru, what more will we
17:23 see through it?
17:25 Will it confirm what the Spanish wrote in their chronicles?
17:29 That courage, along with guns and steel swords, gave a tiny band of conquistadors such an
17:36 advantage, they could vanquish thousands.
17:47 Spanish chronicles of the conquest underplay one critical fact.
17:52 When Pizarro and his conquistadors arrived in Peru, the Inca Empire was falling to pieces.
18:00 It had been formed only a hundred years earlier, when the Inca had spread out from their capital
18:05 at Cusco to overwhelm the many different Indian chiefdoms of the region.
18:12 By 1532, many of the empire's over 10 million inhabitants were fed up with Inca rule, and
18:19 all too willing to ally themselves with the Spanish in a bid to break free of Inca domination.
18:33 For the newly arrived Spanish, this was a great stroke of luck.
18:38 Even with their huge technological advantages, they were hardly a formidable fighting force.
18:46 Many of the conquistadors were illiterate, including Francisco Pizarro himself.
18:54 From peasant stock in rural Spain, most were men of action, not letters.
19:01 The task of telling the story of the conquest largely fell to scribes and chroniclers.
19:08 Over the years, a sort of official version of what happened was composed.
19:14 Historians and archaeologists have long suspected that in the process, facts were altered and
19:20 some conveniently forgotten.
19:24 The chronicles try to justify the conquest, and in order to magnify the glory of the Spaniards,
19:32 they exaggerate.
19:37 The chronicles go to great lengths to paint a dramatic portrait of Spanish hardships and
19:42 heroism, but largely ignore the help given them by their Indian allies.
19:50 They recount a series of dramatic confrontations, in which Pizarro's tiny band confront vast
19:56 Inca armies and against all odds, triumph.
20:02 The most remarkable of these takes place only weeks after the Spanish arrive.
20:08 At Cajamarca in northern Peru, they come upon the troops of the Inca king Atahualpa, who
20:14 are celebrating a successful military campaign.
20:18 The Inca are not prepared for battle.
20:23 The Spanish take them by surprise and massacre them.
20:35 In the process, they take the king hostage.
20:44 Pizarro demands a huge ransom of gold for Atahualpa.
20:50 Once it is paid, he executes him anyway.
20:57 With the Inca world in shock, Pizarro pushes on to the capital, Cusco, which quickly falls
21:03 to the Spanish.
21:07 Within a matter of months, the Inca empire is theirs.
21:15 It takes four years for armed Inca resistance to materialize.
21:21 In 1536, Inca armies mobilize and throw themselves at the conquistadors, both in Cusco and the
21:29 newly founded Spanish city of Lima.
21:34 The great Inca rebellion has begun.
21:41 According to the chronicles, on August 10, 1536, Francisco Pizarro is in Lima.
21:49 He watches in terror as a vast Indian army sweeps across the coastal plain.
21:55 "God save us from the fury of the Indians," is all he can say.
22:04 It was during the siege of Lima that followed that Mochito and his people probably lost
22:10 their lives.
22:26 The time layering or stratigraphy of the cemetery at Puruchuco tells Willie that Mochito's
22:32 remains are from the very first years of the conquest.
22:39 The only event that could explain the injuries and the stratigraphic position of this was
22:46 the siege of Lima.
22:50 But what really happened?
22:54 Now for the first time, we will be able to reexamine the Spanish version of events.
23:04 Willie and Elena believe Mochito and his people were part of the Inca force that confronted
23:10 Pizarro in August 1536.
23:24 The finding of this individual is very important because we can confront the descriptions contained
23:30 in the European documents with material evidence, with the reality.
23:36 A sort of forensic work in order to prove or disprove those narrations.
23:46 Of all the burials found at Puruchuco, Mochito stands out.
23:52 His head had been wrapped in blue cloth.
23:56 He was in the center of the cemetery.
23:58 The way he was buried make Willie and Elena sure Mochito had special status.
24:04 He was a leader.
24:07 As Tim and Al work on Mochito's remains, they discover that many of his injuries seem consistent
24:14 with the classic account of the siege of Lima.
24:18 Perhaps he was one of the captains close to the Inca general who were cut down by Pizarro's
24:23 cavalry charge.
24:26 This in itself might explain his terrible injuries.
24:31 The mandible has been fractured with an incredible amount of force.
24:34 Normally the chin bone is very strong and is very resistant, but in this one it has
24:39 been snapped with a force coming down from the outside, forcing it apart, breaking off
24:45 this little piece of bone that's missing.
24:48 Who knows where that went.
24:50 So some terrible thing has happened there.
24:53 And then, in examining the vertebra, we find that the thoracic vertebrae are all intact.
25:01 But we look at the ribs.
25:04 Part of the rib has been, the first rib has been snapped off.
25:08 And we see additional damage to the inside of the sternum, or the breast bone, where
25:14 it's been snapped, not in one, but two, but in three different places.
25:19 An amazing amount of force has been applied to the outside of this person's body.
25:25 Something very large, very heavy, perhaps a great big rock or even a horse.
25:29 And over in this corner we can see what appears to be...
25:31 Sharp piercing wounds to the skull and crushing wounds to the torso are exactly what you would
25:38 expect in somebody killed in a cavalry charge.
25:43 But when Al and Tim come to examine the remains of the people who died with Mochito, they
25:48 seem to tell a very different story.
25:52 It's very unusual to see this kind of pattern.
25:55 So many of them have had severe blunt force trauma, broken the skull completely apart.
26:01 You know, you get the occipital bone broken, plus you get injuries to the face and orbits.
26:10 A lot of it to the left side as if a blow is coming in to the right.
26:17 While a few of the death injuries look like they were dealt by Spanish steel, the great
26:22 majority point to a very different type of weapon.
26:26 And it's an object that's approximately two to three centimeters in diameter.
26:32 And it takes out the left zygomatic arch, breaks the face, breaks the back of the skull,
26:41 breaks the occipital bone all in one piece.
26:45 Whatever happened to this person was an extremely violent death.
26:51 And the shattered skulls hold yet another shocking surprise.
26:56 A tiny bone beneath the ear indicates that some are women.
27:01 Two or three of them appear to be female.
27:04 You can tell by the small mastoid processes.
27:07 And they've got signs of injury too.
27:11 Is this evidence that women fought alongside Mochito and his men?
27:18 If so, like many of the Puruchuko finds, it would be unprecedented.
27:30 To look for the weapons that could have caused these blunt force skull injuries, Al and Tim
27:35 head for the Gold Museum of Lima.
27:39 It has the largest collection of historic weapons in Peru, both Spanish and Inca.
27:48 The steel weapons of the Spanish would produce either sharp, piercing injuries or crushing
27:53 injuries with clean edges.
27:56 They would not create the sort of blunt force traumas Al and Tim have been examining.
28:03 What sort of weapon could have created those?
28:09 Tim and Al go on to look at the Inca weapons.
28:12 Tim, look at this thing.
28:14 It's really heavy.
28:15 Can you imagine what would happen if that got swung at somebody?
28:20 Isn't that about the same kind of configuration as some of the facial and side head injuries
28:25 you were looking at?
28:26 It's just about the right size.
28:28 And certainly if that...
28:30 So that would punch the skull in more than just a flat kind of fracture.
28:33 Absolutely.
28:34 It would fracture all of the flying bones of the face.
28:35 Well, that might be why a lot of the skulls we weren't finding had the small bones, because
28:39 they're probably so busted up that they disarticulated, right?
28:43 Absolutely.
28:44 Well, that's an incredibly lethal weapon.
28:53 The possibility that the Indians found in the Puruchuco Cemetery were killed by stone
28:58 clubs points to a stunning conclusion.
29:04 Most were killed not by the Spanish, but by other Indians.
29:17 Of 70 individuals in the Puruchuco Cemetery, only three show clear signs of being killed
29:24 by Spanish weapons.
29:27 This directly challenges the account in the Chronicles.
29:33 So what really happened at the siege of Lima?
29:39 Willie knows that to get to the bottom of this mystery, he needs the collaboration of
29:44 other disciplines.
29:46 Not just forensic scientists, but historians too.
29:53 For 500 years, we've been told a handful of Spaniards and their irons and their horses
29:58 were able to take an entire empire.
30:03 Since we historians have gone beyond the Chronicles in the last three decades, this official version
30:10 can be challenged.
30:13 Historian Efrain Trellis has been studying the historical records of the early Spanish
30:18 colony in Peru.
30:21 They are housed in places like this, the archive of the Franciscans at the convent of San Francisco
30:27 de Lima.
30:29 Efrain's attention was drawn to a long forgotten court case which took place in Lima many years
30:36 after the siege.
30:38 It sheds dramatic new light on the events of August 1536.
30:44 Years after the rebellion, the heirs of Pizarro were arguing with the crown.
30:52 And as part of that trial, they contended that the costs of defending Lima from the
30:58 siege had had a heavy impact on the Pizarro estate.
31:04 They had to be rewarded for that.
31:07 The crown disagreed.
31:10 They brought Indians in who were present at the siege.
31:14 The Indians testified that the fighting involved small skirmishes, but no major battle.
31:24 We have references of fighting during the siege, but mostly Indians against Indians.
31:36 Historians also claimed that the Inca army was in the thousands, not tens of thousands,
31:42 that there was no heroic cavalry charge by Pizarro, and that Spaniards who did fight
31:48 were protected by large numbers of Indians who were fighting alongside them.
31:55 So this leads me to think and believe that the great siege must have taken place in a
32:01 very different manner than we have been told.
32:17 Willie's discovery that most of Mochito's warriors were killed by other Indians supports
32:23 the version of events that emerged at the trial.
32:29 It also provides the first scientific evidence for what historians have long suspected, but
32:35 could never prove, that the role of the Indian allies, consistently downplayed by the chronicles,
32:43 was critical to the success of the conquest.
32:52 No one has found more proof of the importance of Indian allies to the Spanish than Maria
32:57 Rostorowsky.
32:58 At 91, she is probably the most respected living historian of the Andes.
33:06 The Spanish were massively supported by their Indian allies.
33:10 This fact, overlooked by the chronicles, completely changes our vision of the conquest.
33:17 Without it, the story is absurd.
33:20 Maria has discovered documents that reveal the true story of the siege of Lima.
33:27 Found in the archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain, they show that Pizarro's survival at
33:32 Lima depended not on military prowess, but on an alliance with a powerful chiefdom in
33:39 the mountain province of Huaylas.
33:44 When Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru, he was a single man of 54.
33:51 Eager to create an alliance with him, the nobility of Huaylas offered him a young girl
33:57 as wife.
33:58 She was called Quispecisa, and she became Pizarro's concubine after baptism.
34:08 It's a curious fact that the Spanish had all the relations they wanted with Andean women,
34:14 but only after they were baptized.
34:19 Pizarro's young concubine, Quispecisa, is with him in Lima when the Indian armies lay
34:24 siege to the city in August 1536.
34:29 She is at the center of what really happens at the siege of Lima.
34:34 As the small Inca army approaches Lima, Pizarro does indeed send out a cavalry charge to fend
34:40 it off.
34:42 They follow the Inca warriors into a dry riverbed outside the city, where the Spanish horse
34:49 forces start to break their ankles on the huge stones.
34:56 Having achieved nothing, the cavalry retreats.
35:02 Soon after, the Inca army once again advances on the city.
35:10 And the Inca army was actually entering the streets of Lima when suddenly they retreated.
35:17 And the Spanish said, "How stupid.
35:19 They walk away when they are on our doorstep?"
35:22 What had happened?
35:26 I found in the archive of the Indies a document saying that Pizarro's young concubine sent
35:33 runners with messages to her mother in Huaylas asking for help.
35:39 She asked for an army, and her mother sent her one.
35:46 Quispe Sisa's mother was a chief in her own right.
35:50 As soon as she received news that her daughter was surrounded in Lima, she dispatched a large
35:56 army to relieve the city.
36:00 The fighting of the siege of Lima takes place in small skirmishes around the city.
36:06 It was probably in one such skirmish that Mochito and his people met their deaths at
36:11 the hands of the Spaniards and their Indian allies.
36:19 Now finally we can tell the story of that last day of their lives.
36:30 We don't know Mochito's real name, but from the way he was buried, we know he was a leader
36:36 and he was young.
36:42 These clavicles, they aren't fused yet, so that's going to be put them around somewhere
36:47 in the range of twenties, in the early twenties, late teens, maybe eighteen to twenty-two.
36:54 Typically he would have had at least one wife and children.
37:01 He may have known nothing of the upcoming battle until Inca emissaries came to Puruchuco
37:07 demanding his support for their fight against the Spanish.
37:19 On the morning of the attack, he would have set out from Puruchuco to cover the five miles
37:25 to the new Spanish settlement at Lima.
37:31 He and his fellow warriors would have been armed with the traditional Inca weapons, stone
37:36 clubs, bolas and spears.
37:40 They were accompanied by their women, not as warriors, but probably as carriers of food
37:47 and water for the day's fighting.
37:54 Don't forget that the viruses might have already arrived and decimated the indigenous population
38:00 since they had lost so many warriors.
38:03 It was probably women who carried the supplies.
38:10 Mochito and his people were part of the Inca army that tried to enter Lima and was forced
38:15 to retreat by the arrival of the army from Huaylas.
38:25 One likely scenario is that as they tried to make it back to Puruchuco, they were hunted
38:32 down by a small band of Spaniards with their many Indian allies.
38:53 Those people were clearly outnumbered.
39:04 Their deaths came with savage brutality.
39:12 So this is another individual who has a series of blunt force injuries, perimortem injuries
39:18 to the left side of the cranium.
39:22 One warrior was killed like no other, shot in the head by a Spanish arquebus, the first
39:29 recorded gunshot victim in the New World.
39:36 It is very clear that everything we've evaluated is consistent with indeed this being a gunshot
39:41 wound.
39:44 No one was spared the slaughter, not even the women.
39:50 This has been a young woman and she's been hit very hard.
40:00 As a leader, Mochito would have been attacked with special ferocity.
40:10 He's missing his face and there are no facial fragments recovered.
40:16 The bones of his limbs and torso were smashed by club blows and probably the hooves of a
40:23 Spanish horse.
40:28 That damage extends all the way up to the first rib, which has also been snapped.
40:35 If he was not dead already, the three puncture wounds to his head would certainly have killed
40:41 him.
40:47 When we have a chance to look at the CAT scans where we can actually peer inside the skull,
40:52 we can see that the inner layer of the skull is punched out in all three cases.
41:01 That much force pushing into the skull would have caused death.
41:08 Perhaps in a final coup de grace, Mochito died as a Spanish lance stabbed him three
41:13 times in the back of his skull.
41:30 Sometime later, the people of Purochuco came to gather their dead.
41:42 Perhaps a day or more had passed before they dared venture out.
41:47 Rigor mortis had already set in.
41:51 This might explain the unusual sprawled postures in their graves.
41:58 With war parties still in the area, there was no time for proper death rituals.
42:05 Mochito and the people who died with him were hastily buried in their clan cemetery.
42:20 From their remains, the work of archaeologists, scientists and historians has uncovered a
42:27 long hidden truth.
42:30 The conquest of Peru was a matter of Indians fighting Indians.
42:35 Indians took Cusco.
42:37 Indians defended Cusco.
42:40 Indians attacked Lima.
42:42 Indians defended Lima.
42:44 Now we have solid evidence.
42:48 Why was the massive participation of Indian armies in the Spanish conquest of Peru left
42:54 out of the chronicles?
42:58 To gain their support, the conquistadors promised their Indian allies the independence and influence
43:04 they had been denied by the Inca.
43:08 After the conquest, the promises were all conveniently forgotten.
43:13 There has been a political interest to erase from the historical landscape all the indigenous
43:21 elements that helped Pizarro.
43:30 The story of the Spanish alliances with the Andean Indians who fought their battles for
43:35 them is the great untold story of the conquest.
43:43 By a strange twist of fate, it is their victims, Mochito and the people who died with him at
43:49 the siege of Lima, whose bones have borne witness to this long forgotten truth.
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