West Haven, Conn., June 19, 2007 - Two University of New Haven forensic scientists, Timothy Palmbach and Dr. Al Harper, may well have documented the first gunshot wound in the Americas-a skull injury caused by a gunshot wound-and their sleuthing has lead to some rewriting of South American history. At 8 p.m., on June 26 on PBS's Nova, their work will be featured in "The Great Inca Rebellion."
In Oct., 2006, the two packed up their forensics equipment for a journey to an excavated Inca cemetery in Peru. The dry Peruvian soil had preserved hundreds of corpses from a long-fought Inca rebellion, and the archaeologist who found them, Guillermo Cock, an expert on Andean cultures, wanted to know why so many of their faces were crushed. At least one had an unexplained hole in the head.
The seventy-five or so corpses also had been prepared for death quite differently than their counterparts. In fact, it seemed they had been buried in a hurry. Dr. Harper, a forensic anthropologist and executive director of The Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science, and Palmbach, an associate professor and director of UNH's forensic science program, investigated a historic battle that pitted club-wielding Inca warriors against Spanish horsemen.
Their research has helped Cock dispute the Pizarro legend. The new research has determined that Francisco Pizarro's legendary lightning campaign, with a band of only two hundred Spanish conquistadores opposing thousands of Inca warriors, did not make for an overnight victory, even though history insists it did. Rather, the Incas fought a long, hard guerrilla war against the Spanish, complete with Inca mastery of Spanish weapons and strategies, Cock says.
A leader in experiential learning, the University of New Haven provides its students with a unique combination of solid liberal arts and real-world, hands-on professional training. A private University founded in 1920, UNH has a full-time undergraduate enrollment of more than 2,400 students-with 70 percent residing on its 80-acre main campus-and a graduate school enrollment that exceeds 1,700. The University offers more than 80 undergraduate degrees and more than 25 graduate degrees through its four colleges, in fields such as sports management, nutrition and dietetics, forensic science, music and sound recording, engineering, computer science, fire science and criminal justice. University of New Haven students study abroad through a variety of distinctive programs.
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