Thousands of Inca mummies, some of them bundled together in groups of up to seven, have been uncovered from an ancient cemetery situated near Lima in Peru.
Believed to be the largest cemetery from one time period ever excavated in Peru, lead archaeologist Guillermo Cock said as many as 10,000 Incas were possibly buried at the site at Puruchuco in Peru’s Rimac Valley between 1480 and 1535.
But Cock, a Peruvian archaeologist, said the site was being destroyed at an alarming rate by humans, including the release of gallons of sewage daily into the shantytown’s streets that had seeped underground and damaged some of the mummies.
“The consequences of humanity on these burials are terrible,” said Cock, adding that some of the mummies were riddled with worms. “It was not a pretty sight.”
Cock, who estimates they uncovered the remains of between 2,200 and 2,400 Incas, said the cemetery provided a huge scientific sampling of the Inca population from infants to the elderly and from the rich to the very poor.
“We have what in sociological terms, we would call the perfect stratification of society. Each social class and group and age is proportionally represented,” Cock told a news conference at National Geographic’s Washington headquarters.
“This will give us a unique opportunity to look into the Inca community, study their lives, their health and their culture,” added Cock, who has been doing archaeological work in Peru since 1983 and is an adviser to the Peruvian government.
The Nazca culture was the archaeological culture that flourished from approximately 100 BC to 800 AD beside the arid, southern coast of Peru in the river valleys of the Rio Grande de Nazca drainage and the Ica Valley. It is famous for the Nazca Lines, a group of very large geoglyphs made in the soil of the Nazca Desert.
The Incas once ruled a vast swath of South America, stretching from Colombia to Chile but Spain’s Francisco Pizarro and his band of 160 conquistadores, using cannons and horses, brought that empire to a bloody end in 1533.
Some of the “mummy bundles” contained as many as seven people buried along with their possessions and wrapped in textiles, a copious array of beautifully decorated items, said Cock, including well-preserved masks, a war club, hand-painted textiles, and pottery.
The bodies were not embalmed; he said but were buried by placing them in dry soil packed with textiles that helped preserve them for over a thousand years.
“The process, although natural, was intentional,” he said. So far, Cock said only three bundles had been unwrapped in what was a painstaking, expensive process. It would take generations before the full implications of the find were known.
One of the unwrapped bundles, nicknamed the Cotton King, was made up of hundreds of pounds of raw cotton. Inside was the body of an Inca noble and a baby as well as 70 items including food, pottery, animal skins, and cord.
Among the most interesting discoveries was the number of elite members of Inca society, some of whom were still wearing elaborate feathered headdresses that were buried with them. Another striking find was 22 intact and 18 dismembered “false heads,” or masks, according to archaeologist Cabezas. These are many bundled individuals usually reserved for the elite with a bump on top loaded with cotton and resembling a human head, many of them with wigs.
These bundles contain several personal items, one of them the key person and the remainder probably accompanying him in the afterlife. The bodies of adults are in the traditional fetal position, with their possessions arranged around them.
Historical excavations of the pre-Inca Nazca or Nasca civilization cemetery at Nazca Archaea in Peru began in 1956, led by archaeologist Cabezazas.
Cock said it was unclear whether all of the bodies in these bundles were related, but probably when a key person died, his body was put aside until the remainder of his party died and could be buried with him.
“Mummy bundles are like time capsules from the Inca,” said Johan Reinhard, preeminent researcher at the National Geographic Society. “The huge number of mummies from one period of time provides an unparalleled opportunity for new information about the Incas.”
Around 50,000 to 60,000 artifacts were retrieved from the site, and 22 of these are on display at National Geographic, including ancient ceramic pots and patterned textiles. Cock and his team worked at a frenetic pace to salvage as much as they could from the cemetery before the shantytown was leveled for development.
The site, known as Tupac Amaru, was inhabited by 1,240 families who sought refuge there in 1989 after fleeing guerrilla fighting in the Peruvian highlands. Following the excavation, the cemetery has yielded tens of thousands of well-preserved artifacts, such as ceramic pots and woven textiles. The community has taken items from the tombs of thousands of ancestors buried deep into the ground, other graves were disturbed by bulldozers in 1998.
Shantytown dwellers fought to remain on the site and archeologists turned the area into a giant dig, building bridges for people to cross the streets. Some of the residents joined in the dig. Some of the graves were found in every class of the society, especially in a dusty school playground which had been leveled several years ago.