Title: Imperial decline, drought, and disease: Contextualizing tuberculosis in pre-Hispanic Peru

Authors: Elizabeth A. Nelson^1,2, Aditya Kumar Lankalipalli¹, Maria Spyrou^1,2, Åshild Vågene⁴, Susanna Sabin⁵, Tiffiny A. Tung⁶, Alexander Herbig^1,3, Kirsten I. Bos^1,3

Affiliations: ¹Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany; ²Department of Genetics and Genomes, Institute Pasteur, Paris, France; ³Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany; ⁴Section for Evolutionary Genomics, The GLOBE Institute, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; ⁵Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA, USA; ^f Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Abstract: The biocultural phenomena of infectious disease outbreaks in human populations are reflected in the context of pathogen emergence and demographic pattern of disease. In tuberculosis (TB), these patterns are structured by environmental and socio-political factors, including malnutrition, socio-political distress, and climatic variability. Such trends may also be observed in past archaeological contexts such as the Late Intermediate period (LIP, 1000–1400 CE) of the Andes, which hosted dramatic climatic shifts and socio-political transitions. This LIP began with a shift to more dispersed settlements following the decline of the Wari, the first Andean empire. This was coincident with a severe drought, leading to dietary changes, an apparent increase in violence, and the sudden appearance of skeletal changes suggestive of TB.

Here, we present an investigation of TB in LIP contexts from Huari, the former administrative center of the Wari Empire. Using morphological and molecular methods, we analyzed comingled human remains from three sectors of Huari and identified TB in communities from Terminal Wari (950–1050 CE) and post-Wari (1275–1400 CE) contexts. We employed a broad pathogen screening method that allowed for the identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) DNA. This was followed by the successful reconstruction of seven high quality MTBC genomes through exerted effort in laboratory and analytical methods. In this talk, we discuss the methods we employed to recover MTBC DNA and the results of our phylogenetic analysis which reveals the MTBC strains recovered from these highland communities are closely related to those recovered from contemporaneous contexts in coastal Peru over 500 km away. Our results suggest rapid movement of these MTBC strains across the Andean landscape, providing insight on the ecology and evolution of TB in the Andes while also contribute a better understanding of the cultural and environmental context of TB at a local level in the site of Huari, Peru.