The discovery came about by chance. Members of the community were opening a new road by hand towards El Duraznillo, one of the most remote corners of Anfama, when they saw fragments of bone in the soil. They stopped digging. In June 2025 a rescue excavation followed, led by archaeologists Romina Canova and Stefania Chiavassa Arias of the Archaeology Team of the Southern Calchaquí Peaks (CONICET-UNC), working with Osvaldo Díaz of the Provincial Cultural Heritage Directorate and research fellows Francisco Franco and Gonzalo Moyano.
At first they thought the grave held at least two people. Laboratory work showed there were four: three young men of about twenty and one infant, who lived sometime between 400 and 900 AD. The burial was ceremonial. Around it the team found signs of gatherings and offerings: decorated pottery, a quartzite arrowhead, and the bones of animals that may have been eaten there, among them camelids, birds, and possibly deer and peccary.
Anfama is a hamlet on the eastern slope of the Cumbres Calchaquíes, about 1,800 metres up in the mountain forest. Ten years ago no vehicle could reach it. The walk from the nearest town took seven to eight hours. The archaeology team has worked in this basin since around 2014. They have mapped farming villages from the first millennium, with round stone houses built around central patios. Each house was home to sixteen to twenty-five people, who grew maize, beans and squash on terraces cut into the slopes. The young men and the child in the grave at El Duraznillo belonged to that world.
That world lasted a long time and then broke apart. The people of Tafí and Anfama fought in the Second Calchaquí War in the seventeenth century, and historians say the war hastened the end of the life their ancestors had built. The community that survives here is now registered under national law as the Diaguita Indigenous Community of Anfama.
Argentine law has given Indigenous communities the right to claim ancestral remains from museum collections since 2001. These bones never reached a museum. They went from the soil to the laboratory and back to the soil within just over a year.
The officiant, Santos Pastrana, led the handover. Beside Álvarez stood the former cacique Antonio Carranzano, and with them the caciques of neighbouring communities: Alejo Azar of Tafí del Valle and Alberto Antonio Romano of Mala Mala, together with Gerardo Alvi, communal delegate of Raco. The archaeologists who had lifted the bones from the ground now laid them back in it. The community members who had been clearing a road placed their offerings beside them.
The road to El Duraznillo is still unfinished. Next to it, four people from the first millennium are back in the ground.