About 1,000 years ago, a pre-Inca culture obtained wild parrots from hundreds of miles away in the Amazon rainforest and then kept them captive in what is now coastal Peru, all so people could access the birds’ vibrant feathers, which were “prestigious symbols of status,” a new study finds.
Scientists found some of these feathers in a 1,000-year-old tomb about 20 years ago. Now a new analysis reveals the “complete journey of these feathers”, including where the birds originated, what they ate and what routes the live birds were likely taken before being traded to Yschmaa pre-Inca society that flourished from about 1000 to 1470 AD.
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Scientists only discovered the burial in 2005 after a ground-penetrating radar survey and a subsequent excavation revealed two large, stone-lined graves near Pachacamac Temple20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Lima. In one of the two Yschma tombs, the archaeologists found brightly colored parrot feather ornaments that had been preserved for centuries.
Now, an international team of researchers has analyzed the feathers’ DNA and chemical composition, concluding that the feathers came from live Amazon parrots that had been transported, and likely traded, across the mountains before being held in captivity on the Peruvian coast. Their new study was published Tuesday (March 10) in the journal Nature communication.
“Our study shows that centuries before the Incas, societies such as Ychsma, the Chimúand others already managed sophisticated, organized long-distance trade networks,” co-author of the study Izumi Shimadaco-director of the Pachacamac Archaeological Project that originally found the tombs and a professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University, told LiveScience in an email. “They had deep ecological knowledge and negotiated trade agreements that connected the Amazon with the coastal deserts, revealing that these states (were) more interconnected.”
The discovery shows how much effort these societies invested in what they considered prestigious objects. At Pachacamac, these feathers were found adorned with false heads—cloths filled with reeds and other plants—attached to 34 burial bundles of deceased individuals that were also decorated with small cinnamon masks, suggesting that the feathers were used in ceremonial activities such as burial rites.
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However, it seems that the birds in captivity did not live at the temple.
“Indeed, our research suggests that large-scale captive breeding of these birds may not have occurred in Pachacamac itself (no parrot skeletons, eggshells or evidence of breeding houses were found), but further north perhaps in the Chimú empire, which then traded the harvested feathers south to Ychsma,” study first author. George Olaha research fellow at The Australian National University, told LiveScience in an email. The proposed breeding site for the Chimú is based on the new paper’s computer models, he added.
A holy place
The Pachacamac temple and its oracle served as the heart of the Yschma community, which controlled the valleys around Lima before the Inca conquest around 1470. “Because of the widespread and long-standing reputation of Pachacamac, elites of various cultures in ancient Peru sought the privilege of being buried near the temple,” Shimada said. “It is believed that the site contained tens of thousands of burials of elites from different cultures and regions.”
After the Spanish conquest in 1533looters ransacked tombs at Pachacamac for centuries, stealing and destroying countless Yschma artifacts. When the Pachacamac archaeological project began its work in the early 2000s, many researchers believed that no intact elite tombs had been left by the temple — so the discovery of the two tombs was an “exceptional event,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Feather quest
In their investigation, the team looked at the mitochondrial DNA of 25 feathers found in the graves and determined that the ornaments attached to the burial bundles came from at least four tropical parrot species: scarlet macaws (Macaw macaw), red and green macaws (Ara chloropterus), blue-and-yellow macaws (Ara ararauna) and mealy amazons (Amazona farinosa). All these birds are native to tropical lowland forests east of the Andes, not to the Peruvian coast.
These birds lived hundreds of miles from Ychsma, suggesting that the community traded with others to obtain the birds.
“The fact that they ended up more than 500 kilometers away, on the other side of South America’s highest mountain range, proves human intervention,” Olah said in a statement. “They don’t naturally fly over the Andes.”
An analysis of the feathers’ isotopes (variations of elements with varying numbers of neutrons in their nuclei) sheds light on the birds’ diet.
Unlike the diets of modern wild parrots, which are rich in fruits and seeds, the ancient feathers from Pachacamac showed diets rich in plants such as maize and possibly foods associated with coastal agriculture enriched with seabird droppings.
“Because they showed a coastal diet, it proves that the birds were brought to a coastal location alive and kept in captivity long enough to molt and grow new feathers with the isotopic signature we detected,” Olah told LiveScience in an email.
The macaws also showed a higher genetic diversity in their DNA, in contrast to the low diversity expected from a small captive breeding colony. This suggested that local breeding occurred near Pachacamac and that birds were repeatedly obtained from Amazonian populations and moved through trade routes in the mountains.
“While it’s tempting to think of them as pets, the archaeological evidence suggests they were primarily maintained for their feathers, which were valuable prestige items used in elite tunics, headdresses and burial bundles,” Olah said.
Find the routes across the Andes
To find out how these birds moved across the Andes, the team turned to computational models. They plugged in ancient topography, river systems and ocean conditions, then ran a “least cost” route analysis to determine which routes would have required the least energy from human caravans.
The more efficient routes pointed to two likely corridors: one through northern networks linked to coastal regions where the Chimú kingdom was located and another through central Andean passages connecting the coast with eastern lowlands.
“The recommended best paths actually made good sense and also matched well with historical and archaeological evidence,” Olah said.
Olah, G., Bover, P., Llamas, B., Heiniger, H., Rafael, S. L., & Shimada, I. (2026). Ancient DNA and spatial modeling reveal a pre-Inca parrot trade. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69167-9
