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Americas’ “earliest recorded gunshot victim”

Rory Carroll

A young Inca warrior in Peru felled by the musket ball of a conquistador in 1536

— PHOTO: AFP

A 500-year-old human body sports a wound believed to have been caused by a Spanish firearm, in the first documented gunshot victim in the New World, found in an Inca cemetery near Lima, Peru, in this handout photo from National Geographic.

Archaeologists have identified the earliest victim of a gunshot wound found in the Americas: a young Inca warrior in Peru felled by the musket ball of a Spanish conquistador in 1536. The body, which had two round holes in the skull, was one of 72 found in a mass grave in the Lima suburb of Puruchuco during excavations for a road.

The victim, a man aged between 18 and 22, is thought to have been shot after an Inca uprising called the siege of Lima. A plug of bone which had the markings of an old musket ball was found near the skull. An electron microscope scan which identified traces of lead in the skull confirmed the man was shot.

Al Harper, director of the Henry C Lee Institute of Forensic Science and one of the team who studied the skull, said: “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.”

Other indigenous people are presumed to have been shot by the Spanish invaders in the 44 years between the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the warrior’s death but he is the oldest documented example.

“Putting together all the evidence, we don’t have a doubt about what happened,” said Guillermo Cock, an archaeologist with Peru’s National Institute of Culture who investigated the site. The find was announced by the National Geographic Society and will be featured in a PBS television documentary this month.

The man is thought to have died after the conquistadores broke an Inca siege and tracked down groups of enemy fighters, events the Spanish recorded in mid-August 1536. It had been one of many doomed Inca efforts to regain control after the Europeans had executed the indigenous leader, Atahualpa. The musket victim was one of 72 persons buried in shallow graves with few wrappings and no ceremonial offerings, prompting speculation that they were killed near Lati Canal, a post-siege mopping up operation. It was a savage affair. Most of the dead, who included women and children, had been hacked, torn, impaled or bludgeoned, in many cases with stone implements. —

Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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