A new report by Smithsonian archaeologists and colleagues in the International Journal of Paleopathology identifies a bone tumor in the upper right arm of an adolescent who was buried in about 1300 AD in a trash heap at a site in western Panama called Cerro Brujo or Witch Hill. The reason for what appears to be a ritual burial in this abandoned pre-Colombian settlement is unknown.
“Based on the analysis of a tooth from the individual, we think he or she was buried about 150 years after the settlement was abandoned,” said Nicole Smith-Guzmán, post-doctoral fellow in staff scientist Richard Cooke’s lab at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. “And based on the fact that the body was tightly wrapped in the fetal position and buried face down with two clay pots and a shell trumpet like those still used by indigenous Ngäbe people in this area today, we consider this a ritual burial.”
STRI archaeologist Olga Linares (1936-2014) and Anthony Ranere, professor emeritus at Temple University, discovered the burial in 1970, during a study funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Linares proposed that the first inhabitants of Cerro Brujo were farmers who had fled to the site, about 3 kilometers from the Caribbean coast, from the nearby Chiriquí highlands when Volcán Barú erupted in approximately 600 AD. Linares and Ranere found evidence that the site was inhabited twice, once from about 600 AD and a second time between 780 and 1252 AD.