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Chile's child mummy secrets unwrapped |
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Written by Xiuhcoatl
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Nov 27, 2005 at 02:13 PM |
Chile's child mummy secrets unwrapped
November 27 2005 at 11:36AM
By Fiona Ortiz
Living in the harsh desert of northern Chile's Pacific coast more than
7 000 years ago, the Chinchorro fishing tribe mysteriously began
mummifying dead babies - removing internal organs, cleaning bones,
stuffing and sewing up the skin, putting wigs and clay masks on them.
The Chinchorro mummies are the oldest known artificially preserved
dead, dating from thousands of years before Egyptian mummies, and the
life quest of the archaeologists who study them is to discover why this
early society developed such a complex death ritual.
Archaeologist Bernardo Arriaza, who studies the Chinchorro at the
University of Tarapaca in Chile's northernmost city Arica, launched a
daring new theory this year.
"I was reading a Chilean newspaper that talked about pollution and it
had a map of arsenic and lead pollution, and it said arsenic caused
abortions. I jumped in my seat and said, 'That's it'," Arriaza said.
Arriaza says high levels of arsenic in the water in the region, which
persist to this day, meant more premature births, stillbirths,
spontaneous abortions and higher infant mortality among the Chinchorro.
"We've always known that the Camarones (area where the mummies are
found) had a lot of arsenic, and the first mummies were children," he
said.
He thinks the Chinchorro began preserving dead babies to express
personal and community grief and later began mummifying adults as well,
and the practice became more elaborate.
Since the 1960s, archaeologists have excavated more than 100 delicate,
diminutive bodies, many preserved intentionally. They were stuffed with
plants and sea grasses and decorated with clay.
They have also found fishing hooks, baskets and sea shells used as
pallets, still stained with the red and black paint used to decorate
the mummies.
The Chinchorro were hunter-gatherers who lived at river mouths, fishing
with spears, hooks and nets and building their movable shelters from
sea-lion pelts and bones.
Their primitive life without domesticated animals, pottery, agriculture
or metallurgy contrasts with the elaborate mummification they
developed, thousands of years before the Inca civilisation dominated
the area and also practised mummification.
"These complex funerary practices are usually associated with more
advanced societies with a state system, but here you are talking about
hunter-gatherers who lived with a simple social and political
organisation," said Arriaza's colleague at the University of Tarapaca,
archaeologist Vivien Standen.
The practice lasted more than 3 000 years and went through different
stages before the Chinchorro society disappeared about 2000 BC.
The earliest mummies were like statues covered with unbaked black clay.
Thousands of years later the treatment of the skin and bones became
more elaborate and the Chinchorro began finishing their mummies with
red ochre paint on open-mouthed masks.
The University of Tarapaca is struggling with scarce funds to preserve
the dozens of mummies already dug up, no money to excavate new ones and
nowhere to put them either.
"We have a research policy and we order our academics not to dig. They
have to do their research on the existing material," said Hector
Gonzalez, head of the university's anthropology department, which runs
a small museum at San Miguel de Azapa outside Arica.
The museum's warehouse - off limits to the public - holds 42 of the
anthropology department's 130 mummies. But it's a low-budget
preservation effort of earthquake-proof carts and beds of sand holding
the small bodies. There's no money for controlling temperature or
humidity to stem deterioration.
The museum has an operating budget of just $130 000 a year but recently
received $750 000 from the university and the local government to build
a new building that will house many of the Chinchorro mummies in a new
exhibit so that visitors can finally view them.
Gonzalez said the new building is an important step, but called on
private enterprise to get involved and help the university properly
store and excavate the remains of this unique ancient culture.
Despite the no-excavation rule, mummies keep popping up around Arica,
where a salty, dry climate has preserved burial grounds for millennia.
Digging for a hotel in downtown Arica earlier this year, construction
workers came across a large cemetery.
The hotel project was halted and the university agreed to purchase the
land and turn it into an on-site museum to avoid moving the fragile
mummies.
Standen, who has studied the Chinchorro for 20 years, is now
investigating the quartz spearheads embedded in some of the mummies'
bones and evidence of blows to the left side of their faces, and
developing a theory about possible ritual violence.
What she and Arriaza are sure about is that the mummified bodies became
religious art - statues with a spiritual meaning - after the Chinchorro
spent months preparing them.
"They lived with them a while, they probably took the mummies from
place to place with them" before eventually placing them in simple
collective tombs, Standen said. - Reuters |
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Archaeology 