Parrot Feathers Reveal Mind-Blowing Pre-Incan Trade Routes

Send us Fan Mail 📖 Read the companion Substack essay In 2005, archaeologists excavating an intact elite tomb at Pachacamac — the paramount pre-Inca religious site on Peru's central coast — found tropical parrot feathers where they had no business being: brilliant, iridescent red, blue, and green, cascading from false heads on thousand-year-old funerary bundles, hundreds of miles from the nearest Amazon rainforest. A landmark study in Nature Communications reconstructed what happened — and it ...