Battles of Cerro Sechín.

PRIMITIVE art; ARCHAEOLOGICAL surveying; CERRO Sechin Site (Peru)

The gruesome monoliths of Cerro Sechín in northern Peru have puzzled archaeologists, who have attempted to understand carvings of fierce warriors surrounded by severed heads streaming blood, eyeballs lined up in tidy rows, and neatly stacked piles of vertebrae. Some have suggested bizarre interpretations, such as the notion that the 3,500-year-old site was a center of medical learning, where anatomical drawings of disembodied limbs and ruptured intestines were carved for study. A possible answer came not from archaeological research but from the work of cultural anthropologists working in the highlands of southern Peru and Bolivia.