RESEARCH ARTICLE Ancient DNA Analysis Suggests Negligible Impact of the Wari Empire Expansion in Peru’s Central Coast during the Middle Horizon Guido Valverde1*, María Inés Barreto Romero2, Isabel Flores Espinoza2, Alan Cooper1, Lars Fehren-Schmitz3, Bastien Llamas1☯, Wolfgang Haak1,4☯ 1 Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South a11111 Australia, Australia, 2 Proyecto Arqueológico Huaca Pucllana, Lima, Perú, 3 Department of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, United States of America, 4 Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. *
[email protected] OPEN ACCESS Abstract Citation: Valverde G, Barreto Romero MI, Flores Espinoza I, Cooper A, Fehren-Schmitz L, Llamas B, The analysis of ancient human DNA from South America allows the exploration of pre- et al. (2016) Ancient DNA Analysis Suggests Columbian population history through time and to directly test hypotheses about cultural Negligible Impact of the Wari Empire Expansion in Peru’s Central Coast during the Middle Horizon. and demographic evolution. The Middle Horizon (650–1100 AD) represents a major transi- PLoS ONE 11(6): e0155508. doi:10.1371/journal. tional period in the Central Andes, which is associated with the development and expansion pone.0155508 of ancient Andean empires such as Wari and Tiwanaku. These empires facilitated a series Editor: Alessandro Achilli, Universita degli Studi di of interregional interactions and socio-political changes, which likely played an important Pavia, ITALY role in shaping the region’s demographic and cultural profiles. We analyzed individuals from Received: February 14, 2016 three successive pre-Columbian cultures present at the Huaca Pucllana archaeological site Accepted: April 30, 2016 in Lima, Peru: Lima (Early Intermediate Period, 500–700 AD), Wari (Middle Horizon, 800– 1000 AD) and Ychsma (Late Intermediate Period, 1000–1450 AD).