Chachapoya mummies from the Laguna Huayabamba

Author(s):  
Kenneth C. Nystrom

Beyond the material recovered from the laguna de los Cóndores by Dr. Sonia Guillén and Adriana von Hagen, the nature of Chachapoya mortuary ritual and body processing techniques has rarely been described. This paper reports on another Chachapoya site that contained mummified remains, the Laguna Huayabamba. Located near the modern town of Uchucmarca, the Laguna Huayabamba consists of a large residential sector and a cliff-side funerary complex. The mummified and skeletal remains described here were recovered from a single tomb. The remains represent approximately 48 individuals including (1) mummy bundles with varying degrees of preservation, (2) disarticulated crania, and (3) primary interments. Textile samples taken from one of the mummy bundles have been radiocarbon dated to 1100 AD, well before the 1472 AD Inka invasion of the region. This paper presents new data on Chachapoya body processing techniques and explores some of the implications for our understanding of mortuary ritual.

Author(s):  
Takeshi Ishikawa

This chapter examines the social meaning of deviant mortuary practices from an osteoarchaeological perspective using skeletal remains from the Middle Jomon Period (ca. 3500–2500 cal BC) found at the Kusakari shell mound. The analyses focus on attributes associated with mortuary body treatments: 1) arrangements of remains, 2) body posture and direction, and 3) the location of burials within the cemetery. Although the usual body postures were dorsal during the period, one individual was laid in a prone position with an unusual body direction compared with other burials. The skeletal arrangement also revealed that the individual had been disarticulated early in the postmortem decay process; however, the remains were located within the usual cemetery area. Based on these results and the extraordinary amount of varied faunal remains in the vicinity, the deviant mortuary treatments appeared to arise from a specific social persona rather than an unusual context of death, such as drowning, suicide, warfare, or other cause.


1995 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 303-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Malone ◽  
Simon Stoddart ◽  
Anthony Bonanno ◽  
Tancred Gouder ◽  
David Trump ◽  
...  

As part of the research of the joint Anglo-Maltese project on the island of Gozo, a Zebbug period rock-cut tomb was discovered in the south-east corner of the Brochtorff Circle. The integrity of this tomb and the interdisciplinary approach applied to its study make it a unique find from the Maltese islands and rare within the southern central Mediterranean.The article presents the stratigraphy, pottery, stone, shell and bone artefacts, skeletal remains, animal bone, molluscan samples, and radiocarbon dates from the tomb. At the same time the significance of the tomb for the formative phases of collective burial, exchange and symbolic processes in the central Mediterranean and the origins of Maltese insularity is explained.


Author(s):  
R. C. Gonzalez

Interest in digital image processing techniques dates back to the early 1920's, when digitized pictures of world news events were first transmitted by submarine cable between New York and London. Applications of digital image processing concepts, however, did not become widespread until the middle 1960's, when third-generation digital computers began to offer the speed and storage capabilities required for practical implementation of image processing algorithms. Since then, this area has experienced vigorous growth, having been a subject of interdisciplinary research in fields ranging from engineering and computer science to biology, chemistry, and medicine.


Author(s):  
S. Hasegawa ◽  
T. Kawasaki ◽  
J. Endo ◽  
M. Futamoto ◽  
A. Tonomura

Interference electron microscopy enables us to record the phase distribution of an electron wave on a hologram. The distribution is visualized as a fringe pattern in a micrograph by optical reconstruction. The phase is affected by electromagnetic potentials; scalar and vector potentials. Therefore, the electric and magnetic field can be reduced from the recorded phase. This study analyzes a leakage magnetic field from CoCr perpendicular magnetic recording media. Since one contour fringe interval corresponds to a magnetic flux of Φo(=h/e=4x10-15Wb), we can quantitatively measure the field by counting the number of finges. Moreover, by using phase-difference amplification techniques, the sensitivity for magnetic field detection can be improved by a factor of 30, which allows the drawing of a Φo/30 fringe. This sensitivity, however, is insufficient for quantitative analysis of very weak magnetic fields such as high-density magnetic recordings. For this reason we have adopted “fringe scanning interferometry” using digital image processing techniques at the optical reconstruction stage. This method enables us to obtain subfringe information recorded in the interference pattern.


Author(s):  
U. Aebi ◽  
L.E. Buhle ◽  
W.E. Fowler

Many important supramolecular structures such as filaments, microtubules, virus capsids and certain membrane proteins and bacterial cell walls exist as ordered polymers or two-dimensional crystalline arrays in vivo. In several instances it has been possible to induce soluble proteins to form ordered polymers or two-dimensional crystalline arrays in vitro. In both cases a combination of electron microscopy of negatively stained specimens with analog or digital image processing techniques has proven extremely useful for elucidating the molecular and supramolecular organization of the constituent proteins. However from the reconstructed stain exclusion patterns it is often difficult to identify distinct stain excluding regions with specific protein subunits. To this end it has been demonstrated that in some cases this ambiguity can be resolved by a combination of stoichiometric labeling of the ordered structures with subunit-specific antibody fragments (e.g. Fab) and image processing of the electron micrographs recorded from labeled and unlabeled structures.


Author(s):  
R. Sharma ◽  
B.L. Ramakrishna ◽  
N.N. Thadhani ◽  
D. Hianes ◽  
Z. Iqbal

After materials with superconducting temperatures higher than liquid nitrogen have been prepared, more emphasis has been on increasing the current densities (Jc) of high Tc superconductors than finding new materials with higher transition temperatures. Different processing techniques i.e thin films, shock wave processing, neutron radiation etc. have been applied in order to increase Jc. Microstructural studies of compounds thus prepared have shown either a decrease in gram boundaries that act as weak-links or increase in defect structure that act as flux-pinning centers. We have studied shock wave synthesized Tl-Ba-Cu-O and shock wave processed Y-123 superconductors with somewhat different properties compared to those prepared by solid-state reaction. Here we report the defect structures observed in the shock-processed Y-124 superconductors.


Author(s):  
M. A. McCoy

Transformation toughening by ZrO2 inclusions in various ceramic matrices has led to improved mechanical properties in these materials. Although the processing of these materials usually involves standard ceramic powder processing techniques, an alternate method of producing ZrO2 particles involves the devtrification of a ZrO2-containing glass. In this study the effects of glass composition (ZrO2 concentration) and heat treatment on the morphology of the crystallization products in a MgO•Al2•SiO2•ZrO2 glass was investigated.


Author(s):  
W. Krakow ◽  
D. A. Smith

The successful determination of the atomic structure of [110] tilt boundaries in Au stems from the investigation of microscope performance at intermediate accelerating voltages (200 and 400kV) as well as a detailed understanding of how grain boundary image features depend on dynamical diffraction processes variation with specimen and beam orientations. This success is also facilitated by improving image quality by digital image processing techniques to the point where a structure image is obtained and each atom position is represented by a resolved image feature. Figure 1 shows an example of a low angle (∼10°) Σ = 129/[110] tilt boundary in a ∼250Å Au film, taken under tilted beam brightfield imaging conditions, to illustrate the steps necessary to obtain the atomic structure configuration from the image. The original image of Fig. 1a shows the regular arrangement of strain-field images associated with the cores of ½ [10] primary dislocations which are separated by ∼15Å.


Author(s):  
Edgar S. Etz ◽  
Thomas D. Schroeder ◽  
Winnie Wong-Ng

We are investigating by Raman microprobe measurements the superconducting and related phases in the LnBa2Cu3O7-x (for x=0 to 1) system where yttrium has been replaced by several of the lanthanide (Ln = Nd,Sm,Eu,Ho,Er) elements. The aim is to relate the observed optical spectra (Raman and fluorescence) to the compositional and structural properties of these solids as part of comprehensive materials characterization. The results are correlated with the methods of synthesis, the processing techniques of these materials, and their superconducting properties. Of relevance is the substitutional chemistry of these isostructural systems, the differences in the spectra, and their microanalytical usefulness for the detection of impurity phases, and the assessment of compositional homogeneity. The Raman spectra of most of these compounds are well understood from accounts in the literature.The materials examined here are mostly ceramic powders prepared by conventional solid state reaction techniques. The bulk samples are of nominally single-phase composition as determined by x-ray diffraction.


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