Traci Watson from USA Today explains: 
 
 The end product of that grisly work: relics that could easily be carried on the road by people who lived in the region more than a thousand years ago and seem to have had both a reverence for the dead and a highly unsettled lifestyle. The process created "portable ancestors for a mobile population," said study co-author Scott C. Smith, an archaeologist at Franklin & Marshall College. The discovery shows "the dead still played an active and important role in the lives of the living." Nothing terribly exciting was expected from the patch of earth that Smith and a colleague began excavating a decade ago in western Bolivia at a religious complex called Khonkho Wankane. Excavations at the site yielded a number of clues, including 1,000 teeth and small bones sheathed in a thin layer of white plaster, mostly from the feet and hands. The discovery of small blocks made from a white, chalky substance — likely the remnants of quicklime — indicated that the substance was used at the mortuary. Corpses were cut into pieces and then cleaned and curated using the quicklime, which was procured by heating limestone. By boiling body parts in pots of quicklime, the flesh and fat became easier to remove from the bones. The quicklime, when exposed to air, covered the bones in calcium carbonate, or lime plaster. Inside the mortuary, the researchers found a number of body parts coated with just such white plaster, among them a piece of skull, an intact set of hand bones and an intact set of foot bones. The find is reported in the current edition of Antiquity.
– Those who lived in what is now Bolivia more than 1,000 years ago likely wound up at the end of their days in what USA Today calls an "ancient mortuary." There, the morticians of their day dissected the bodies and boiled the various parts in pots of quicklime, which dissolved the flesh and left "plastered bones" in place. Archaeologists theorize that the nomadic population of the day then took the larger bones with them—"portable ancestors for a mobile population," as one of the researchers from Franklin & Marshall College tells the newspaper. The find suggests that "the dead still played an active and important role in the lives of the living." The ritual of the boiling may have been significant in itself, notes io9, citing this passage from the study: "The reaction produced by adding quicklime to water is a violent one, where heat is produced and gas is released," write the researchers. "This would have been quite an impressive sensory experience," and one that may have invoked an "otherworldly realm." Those who lived in this region of the Andes Mountains back then were on the move much of the time, but it appears that the site of the "mortuary," called Khonkho Wankane, gradually became more and more important because of this end-of-life ritual. (Click to read about how other ancients used flour to predict the future.)