About 15 years ago, George Olah, a conservation ecologist at the Australian National University, was conducting research in the Amazon, dangling from the rainforest canopy and collecting blood and feather samples from macaws for his doctoral thesis. Between field seasons, he often explored the archaeological sites along the coast of northern Peru, where the climate was dry and unforested.
One day, at a field museum hundreds of miles from his study site, he spotted macaw feathers tucked inside a reconstruction of an ancient tomb. He was perplexed. “It’s all desert. It’s the other side of the Andes. There’s no rainforest there,” he said. How did the feathers get there?
The question led to a yearslong side project. In a new study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, Dr. Olah and his colleagues have concluded that live parrots were traded far and wide across the Andes for their plumage. The feathers that Dr. Olah saw, which were originally recovered from a tomb dating back 600 to 1,000 years, point to a complex trade network that predates the Inca Empire.
“This is one of those papers that’s going to be a modern classic,” said Rich George, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the research. “I’m a little jealous, to be honest — it’s a great paper.”
For the ancient cultures of coastal Peru, parrot feathers held a high value. Their colors, ranging from bright red to deep blue, represented elite status and power. In recent decades, many feathered artifacts have emerged from ancient tombs, raising questions about which species they came from and whether the birds were brought to the coast alive.
Feathers would have required little maintenance if they had merely been plucked and traded as goods. But live birds captured in the rainforest would have required food, water and protection during the journey — and such movement and trade would probably have relied on a vast network of operation across the Andes.
To retrace the journey, Dr. Olah and his colleagues studied at least three funerary bundles from an ancient tomb that belonged to the Yschma culture, a society that inhabited the central coast of Peru between the year 1000 and 1470, before the Inca arose. These bundles were often accompanied by colorful, feather-rich headdresses.
The scientists began by extracting ancient DNA from 25 feathers, to identify the bird species. Then they compared the results against modern feather samples, including some that Dr. Olah collected during his doctoral fieldwork in the Amazonian rainforest.
They identified four distinct parrot species native to the Amazon: the scarlet macaw, the red-and-green macaw, the blue-and-yellow macaw and the mealy Amazon. These species were genetically diverse, suggesting that the birds were captured in the wild and not bred in captivity, which would have led to inbreeding.
The diets of modern macaws are rich in rainforest plants. But chemical analyses of the ancient feathers found a diet rich in plants that thrive in hot and sunny environments, possibly corn or maize.
Macaws regrow their feathers through a natural molting process that can take up to a year. The study’s results suggest that the ancient birds, captured and transported across the Andes to the coast, were most likely kept in captivity long enough to grow new feathers eating a completely different diet.
These feathers were an integral part of sacred ritual practices, and were treasured artifacts. A live bird that could produce them year after year would have been immensely valuable, said José Capriles, an anthropologist at the Pennsylvania State University who was not involved with the research.
“A bird is like a proverbial hen that lays golden eggs,” he said. “But instead of laying golden eggs, it simply grows feathers.”.
After conducting the DNA and chemical analysis, scientists used landscape modeling to understand how the birds were transported. They studied the region’s topography, its river systems, known archaeological centers and trade hubs that were contemporary to the Ychsma, and then calculated which routes might have been less costly for transporting birds from the Amazonian lowlands to the coast.
Two main routes stood out as possibilities; both aligned with well-traveled trade paths for which scientists have archaeological evidence. One route was through the north; the second took a more direct, central path. The Yschma culture must have also depended on intermediaries to source and trade the parrots.
Dr. Olah saw the research as an extension of his parallel work on the modern, illegal and highly lucrative wildlife trade. “It kind of shows this fascination of, or toward, these birds that are very intelligent, colorful, often noisy,” he said.
“This is just bringing you closer to that human nature,” he added. “That this fascination is not something that’s just relevant to modern time, but it actually goes back.”
Alexa Robles-Gil is a science reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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