Funerary art has the body as its main material component, expresses responses to death and offers insight into relationships between the living and the dead. Chinchorro hunter-gatherer-fisher societies along the Atacama Desert coast provide a key example of such connections, having developed one of the world's oldest-known systems of post-mortem body transformation (c. 7000–3250 BP). A study of 162 modified Chinchorro bodies identifies diachronic changes in these practices, including a decrease in internal stuffing—adding invisible contents that created corporeal volume—and an increase in external body treatment that created visible features. The authors propose that such manipulation was a meaningful form of social embodiment designed to construct a collective identity.

The human head was a potent symbol for many South American cultures. Isolated heads were often included in mortuary contexts, representing captured enemies, revered persons, and symbolic “seeds.” At Salango, a ritual complex on the central coast of Ecuador, excavations revealed two burial mounds dated to approximately 100 BC. Among the 11 identified burials, two infants were interred with “helmets” made from the cranial vaults of other juveniles. The additional crania were placed around the heads of the primary burials, likely at the time of burial. All crania exhibited lesions associated with bodily stress. In this report, we present the only known evidence of using juvenile crania as mortuary headgear, either in South America or globally.

Disposal of the dead in early societies frequently involved multiple stages of ritual and processing. At Khonkho Wankane in the Andes quicklime was used to reduce corpses to bones in a special circular structure at the centre of the site. The quicklime was obtained from solid white blocks of calcium oxide and was then mixed with water and applied to disarticulated body parts. A few plaster-covered bones were recovered from the structure but most had been removed from the site, possibly by itinerant llama caravans. Thus, Khonkho Wankane was a ritual centre to which the dead were brought for processing and then removed for final burial elsewhere.

The World Heritage Site of Wanar in Senegal features 21 stone circles, remarkable not least because they were erected in the twelfth and thirteenth century AD, when Islam ruled the Indian Ocean and Europe was in its Middle Ages. The state of preservation has benefited the exemplary investigation currently carried out by a French-Senegalese team, which we are pleased to report here. The site began as a burial ground to which monumental stones were added, perhaps echoing the form of original funerary houses. Found in a neighbouring field were scoops left from the cutting out of the cylindrical monoliths from surface rock. While the origins of Wanar lie in a period of state formation, the monuments are shown to have had a long ritual use. The investigation not only provides a new context for one of the most important sites in West Africa but the precise determination of the sequence and techniques used at Wanar offers key pointers for the understanding of megalithic structures everywhere.