THE FIRST MEMBER OF the team to unearth human bones at the site of Iglesiachayoq was Félix Huamani, a farmer who lives in the Chicha-Soras Valley of Peru’s Ayacucho region. As he dug through the earth beneath a colonial-era church, he revealed a skull whose teeth and lower jaw were covered with a black soot-like substance. Huamani had just discovered what seemed to be the first archaeological evidence of an Andean resistance movement that arose in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest of 1532. Known as the Taki Onqoy, or the “dancing sickness” in the Quechua language, members of this religious and political movement were said by contemporaneous Spanish clerics to have exhumed their dead from beneath churches and reburied them according to Andean customs. The skull that Huamani had unearthed may be both the first physical evidence of such an act of rebellion and an example of how Andean people transformed Spanish burial customs by intertwining them with their own ritual practices.
Spanish chronicles record that some 30 years after the conquest, Andean rebels who refused to convert to Catholicism gave control of their bodies to huacas, local gods embodied by natural features such as mountains, lagoons, and volcanoes, or by purpose-built shrines. Taki Onqoythrowing stones like demons.” Members of the community worshipped the possessed men and women in a multiday feast of dancing, drinking, and sacrificing animals to invoke the huacas’ favor. Taki Onqoy preachers called for their followers to reject Spanish food and culture, as well as anything associated with Christianity. Because the movement represented a serious threat to Spanish authority, colonial officials decided to repress it. A Spanish clergyman named Cristóbal de Albornoz reported that he had destroyed 1,000 huacas and punished more than 1,800 Taqiongos.
