Hairless dogs may have guided ancient Andean souls in the afterlife
Peru's first great empire left no written records. Now, archaeologists are piecing together who the Wari were with the help of ancient dog mummies.
The Peruvian hairless dog is a bald, wrinkly, and strange-looking pup. Yet, the perro peruano sin pelo, as it is also called, is beloved in Peru as a national symbol. So much so, in fact, that in 2001, the Peruvian congress passed a law declaring the canine part of the country's national heritage—“a species to be preserved.”
Now, for the first time, researchers have found evidence that centuries before the rise of the Inca, ancient people in Peru known as the Wari also lived alongside these canines as companions. The Wari may have even revered these bald dogs as “psychopomps,” or spiritual chaperones chosen to guide the dead into the underworld.
“If dogs are buried in close association with humans, there must have been some kind of bond,” says Weronika Tomczyk, an archeologist at Dartmouth University and an author of the study, which appears in the June edition of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
About a decade ago, while excavating El Castillo de Huarmey—an archeological site on the Peruvian coast about 180 miles north of Lima—a team of Polish, Peruvian, and American archeologists found more than 340 bones they believe belong to at least 20 dogs. Three of the remains, the researchers found, were from ancient Peruvian hairless dogs.
“We were looking for other artifacts and weren't expecting to find dog remains," Tomczyk says, "But when we did, we knew we definitely had to look at them.”
The Peruvian site was an ancient necropolis and a mausoleum to the Wari, who were believed to have been the first Andean empire. They flourished between A.D. 600 and 1050, controlling Peru for about 400 years before the emergence of their much better-known successors, the Inca.
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“The Wari didn't leave a written record. A lot of what we know about the Inca, for example, comes from the early colonial record, with contact accounts from the Spanish,” says David Reid, an archeologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who wasn’t involved in the study. “Also, the Inca constructed roads upon old Wari roads, so some of their record is buried below the Inca archeological footprint, which is larger.”
The discovery of canine remains at El Castillo de Huarmey offers one small puzzle piece toward a better understanding of the Wari, their relationships with animals, and their mortuary rituals.
Well-preserved pup
The bones the team found in and around the mausoleum were not scattered randomly, “even if the site has been, unfortunately, heavily looted in the past decades,” Tomczyk says.
Among the remains were a puppy buried with a male guardian outside the main chamber of the mausoleum, and an adult dog buried with a teenager found in a side room. There was also a small skull with preserved ears and painted in cinnabar, a precious red pigment used across ancient cultures and in funerary rituals in ancient Peru. Finally, the researchers found a well-preserved mummified dog with visible hairless skin.
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“It looked like a farmer had buried that dog there some 50 years ago, but radiocarbon dating showed this was actually the earliest record of that breed on that site,” says Tomczyk.
The dog was an adult male, missing its lower forelimbs. Also missing were its first premolars. The researchers also saw that the red-painted dog skull was missing its first premolars and third molars. The lack of those teeth raised the researchers' suspicions, as their absence is a genetic trait of Peruvian hairless dogs. Further analysis of the mummified adult male dog, using a handheld microscope equipped with a camera, confirmed for the researchers that the dog was, in fact, a Peruvian hairless dog.
Susan deFrance, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Florida who did not take part in the study, calls the work "very sound zooarchaeological research.”
Companion after death?
This is the first time researchers have found Peruvian hairless dogs at a Wari site. But the physical presence of these pups alone is not enough to determine their role in Wari society.
“In the Maya culture of ancient Mexico, dogs like the 'Xolo,' or the Mexican hairless dog, are known as guides to souls into the underworld,” says deFrance.
In other pre-Inca empires, the role of the hairless dog may have been similar. Sculptures found at the burial site of the Old Lord of Sipán may suggest that the hairless dogs participated in sacred rituals among the Moche, a civilization that dominated northern Peru from about A.D. 100 to 800.
“The Moche used to sacrifice dogs, not just the hairless breed, to follow their owners into the afterlife," deFrance says. "The Lord of Sipán has one buried with him.”
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Researchers suspect the dogs might have received special treatment within Wari society. Tomczyk's team conducted isotopic analysis on some canine bones and found that the hairless and other dogs at El Castillo de Huarmey ate the same food as people: in the Wari's case, mostly maize.
They might not have been pets as we know them today, but they were likely close companions to humans even then, the team found. The few signs of dog sacrifice among the findings seemed to be more intimate and individualized, hinting at a close relationship, the researchers say. While guinea pigs and llamas were often butchered for food or sacrificed en masse in pre-Inca societies, dogs seem to have mostly escaped that fate.
“It's almost as if dogs were too important to sacrifice," deFrance adds.
More research is needed to help archaeologists better understand the relationships between pre-Inca societies and dogs, particularly the hairless breed, says Tomczyk. She notes there are ongoing excavations at sites in Peru's lowlands and highlands.
"But I don't think any of those sites reported any findings of the hairless dog yet—it would be very cool to see that,” she adds.
Tomczyk's study helps provide some insight into the mysterious Wari, says Reid, the archeologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
"This is going to be foundational work to understand future archeological evidence in Wari sites," he says. "This was the first experiment of empire in the Andes, and we're just beginning to understand it."
