Centuries before the Inca, Peru’s wealthy imported parrots from afar

This large, elaborate Ychsma funerary bundle features a wooden mask painted with cinnabar and adorned with a parrot-feather headdress. Credit: Olah et al. 2026

Centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire, a much smaller kingdom on the central coast of Peru already had a sophisticated trade network—one it used to import live parrots across the Andes from the Amazon rainforest.

Australian National University conservation geneticist George Olah and his colleagues recently studied feathers from a headdress in a Ychsman noble’s tomb, dating to 1100–1400 CE (the centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire). DNA and chemical isotopes reveal that the parrots the feathers came from (still bright blue, yellow, and green after all these centuries) were born in the wild on the far side of the Andes but kept in captivity somewhere on the Peruvian coast. To pull off importing live parrots from hundreds of ...