New Quaker Notebook

Scientists unearth earliest gun victim in New World
Chicago Sun-Times
June 20, 2007

PERU | Inca likely shot in head by Spanish in 1500s

The musket blast was sudden and deadly, the killing nearly 500 years ago of what may have been the first gunshot victim in the Western Hemisphere.

''We didn't expect it. We saw this skull and saw the almost round hole and thought people must have been shooting around here recently,'' said Guillermo Cock, an archaeologist who found the remains near Lima, Peru.

But he realized that the skull was ancient, and a recent bullet strike would simply have shattered it, Cock said in a telephone interview.

The skull was found among a large group of bones of ancient Incas, who had died violently in the early 1500s as the Spanish conquistadors battled the native empire.

The bones were in shallow graves, leading the archaeologist to speculate the burials were done hurriedly during conflict, perhaps an uprising against the Spanish in 1536.

To be sure this was a gunshot wound—making it the earliest one documented in the Americas—the skull was studied by forensics experts. A scanning electronic microscope found metal fragments from a musket ball in the area around the hole in the skull.

The find will be detailed June 26 on a NOVA/National Geographic TV special.

For more information about this, NOVA|The Great Inca Rebellion airs on PBS on June 26. Of course, when we aren't shooting them, we're killing them with corporate-sponsored poisons. See this Los Angeles Times article on the devastating effects of pervasive lead poisoning of children and families in La Oroya, Peru, by a US-owned smelter.

New Orleans is for sale

If FEMA doesn't come through with reconstruction money, it looks like the city is going to have to get its rebuilding funds (now estimated at $1 billion) from an interested foreign nation.

According to an AP story today, "Cash-strapped New Orleans is turning to foreign countries for help to rebuild as federal hurricane recovery dollars remain slow to flow." They aren't saying which countries are involved, but they "are talking with more than five."

Three flags have flown over New Orleans—Spain, France (twice), and the US. But that was then, and this is now. How does "Little Venezuela" sound?

Bowling for pre-Columbian America

New Orleans is for sale