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Rare Mummy Found With Strange Artifacts, Tattoo in Peru
Posted on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 (CDT) by Thoth
 Disemboweled and decorated with scarlet paint, metal eye plates, and a tattoo, an exquisitely preserved, thousand-year-old mummy has been discovered in Peru. As anthropologists gingerly removed the layers of ancient textiles swaddling the thirtysomething elite male last month at a Lima lab, offerings both strange and familiar came to light—slingshots, corn, a figurine in identical dress.
Taken together, the artifacts, the mummy, and the excavation site suggest that the mysterious, little-studied Chancay civilization held a surprisingly tight grip on the fertile north-central Pacific coast of Peru during the culture's heyday, between A.D. 1000 and 1500, when it finally fell to the unstoppable Inca Empire, experts say. Until now most Chancay remains have come from sites that had been looted or bulldozed for expanding farms, making the specimens' context and origins uncertain.
That spotty record makes the discovery of the new mummy in an untouched, corncob-lined tomb in the Chancay farming village of Rontoy a breakthrough.
"We know
exactly where [this mummy] is from, and we are finding things that we
always thought were Chancay. We actually have a male [wearing] what
we've always called male tunics," Tulane University anthropologist Kit
Nelson said.
"All of these things come
together so we can say, in fact, yes this is Chancay, [and] this is
what it looks like," said Nelson, who, along with Arturo Ruíz Estrada
of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima received
funding for the project from the Committee for Research and Exploration
of the National Geographic Society (which owns National Geographic
News).
"Strange Things We Never Expected"
Nelson and her colleagues
spent several weeks slowly unbundling the mummy, which was wrapped in
layers of finely woven textiles and a gauze-like material.
Embedded in several layers were offerings that helped to paint a more complete—but still mysterious—picture of the Chancay.
In an upper layer, for
example, the scientists found a lone ball of white raw cotton on the
left and right side of the mummy. Several layers closer to the body,
the team found two more balls of cotton another ball of cotton—a white
one on one side of the body, a brown one on the other.
Nelson isn't sure what the cotton balls signify, calling them "strange things we never expected."
According to Guillermo
Cock, a Peruvian archaeologist and expert on Andean cultures, cotton
yarn was sometimes placed in burials as a sign the person was a weaver,
though Cock has never seen balls of raw cotton in a burial.
The mummy—nicknamed "Kiko
Rontoy" by the scientists—held an empty bag and loop of yarn in his
right hand, and corncobs and kernels were found throughout the layers.
Corn was a "very valuable
resource" used for food and to make chicha, a type of beer, said Cock,
who was not involved in the Rontoy project.
That corn was offered in
such abundance in this burial, he noted, is a sign of Kiko Rontoy's
high social status, though some amount of corn is almost always found
at Chancay burials.
Why the Chancay offered corn—and to whom—is unknown, said project co-leader Nelson.
"We don't have any idea what the pantheon of gods was for the Chancay," she said.
Loincloth, Tattoos, Slingshots
The mummy was dressed in two tunics and a loincloth. Slingshots were found around his knees and waist.
Most interesting, according
to Nelson, was a foot-long (30-centimeter-long) wooden figurine dressed
just like the mummy and positioned next to his head. Again, further
study is required to determine the artifact's significance, she said.
On the mummy's right knee
is a black tattoo—a line that follows the angle of the joint. Tattoos
are another sign of elite status, according to Cock, whose work has
been funded in part by the National Geographic Expeditions Council.
The researchers found the mummy's face covered in several layers of the loosely woven, gauzy material.
Little offerings were in
each layer—a piece of silver, for example. He wore a necklace of silver
beads on a cotton string around his neck.
Red paint made with mercury
sulfide covers the mummy's well-preserved face — an adornment
associated with the burials of high-ranking individuals. Hand-pounded
pieces of copper and silver metal cover each eye, and another is placed
between his teeth.
Organs Removed
The mummy's bowels appear
to have been removed via the anus, which shows signs of having been
enlarged, Nelson said. Disembowelment, which was also practiced by
ancient Egyptians, would have aided in the preservation of the body,
she noted.
This may be the only known
instance of preburial disembowelment in an Andean mummy after the
Chinchorro culture, which has yielded disemboweled mummies thousands of
years older than Kiko Rontoy, Cock said.
The tightly wrapped
textiles—plus a 4- to 6-inch (10- to 15-centimieter) layer of raw
cotton—also helped arrest the decay, Nelson said.
She suspects that other preservation measures were also employed but is awaiting lab results before commenting further.
Because the metal plates,
red paint, tattoo, abundant offerings of corn, and intentional
mummification are indications of wealth, Nelson concludes the mummy was
"a person of some kind of status." But there was nothing in the bundle
itself to clearly suggest he was a religious or political leader.
"We know he's elite—he had access to metals, he was buried in an important place. But beyond that, I'm not sure," she said.
Cock agrees the artifacts, especially the metal faceplates, are indications of status.
"That individual is
somebody from the upper class—not necessarily a high-ranking lord, but
a sort of lord within his society," he said.
As for how Kiko Rontoy
died, there is no evidence yet of broken bones or severe lacerations,
project co-leader Nelson said. He may have had an infection, said
Nelson, who is awaiting results from a specialist.
Lucky Strike
Nelson and Ruiz Estrada
discovered the Kiko Rontoy mummy bundle during a series of spot
excavations in 2007 to collect ceramic data at five archaeological
sites along the final 40 miles (65 kilometers) of the Huaura River. The
team dug just a few 3.3-foot-by-3.3-foot (1-meter-by-1-meter) pits at
each site.
The sites are in danger
from looting and threatened by the region's fast-expanding sugarcane
industry. Nelson, a pottery specialist, was in the area with the
humbler hope of finding ceramic remains to help secure better dates for
the Chancay's occupation of the valley.
Rontoy sits where the river valley begins to fan out toward the ocean and is today surrounded by a sea of agricultural fields.
When occupied by the
Chancay, the city was also a thriving agricultural community, Nelson
said, adding that cotton was likely a major crop.
The size of the farm town
during its heyday is unknown, because researchers don't know how many
structures have since been destroyed. Nor do they know how many people
lived in each structure.
The mummy was discovered
beneath the ground floor of a room within an adobe compound — one of
the many such compounds still partially intact.
No other prehistoric
mummies were found in Kiko Rontoy's specially built tomb. But an 1800s
burial was found at the top of the dig site, Nelson said.
Farther down, "we landed right on top of the mummy bundle," Nelson said.
The discovery came as a
surprise, since most pre-Inca dead were buried in cemeteries. Even so,
most pre-Inca compounds contain individual burials for "special
people," said Cock, the Lima-based archaeologist.
The mummy bundle lay on a
bed of corn offerings and was positioned below three empty niches
carved into the adobe walls. What offerings might have been placed in
those niches, however, is unknown, project co-leader Nelson said.
Regional Control
The presence of elites in a
midsize settlement such as Rontoy, Nelson noted, helps to paint a
picture of the Chancay as a culture that had "substantial regional
control" on the north-central coast of Peru during the period known as
the Late Intermediate—about A.D. 1000 to 1476.
At the same time as the
Chancay exerted control and influence over the Huaura Valley region,
the better known, powerful Chimor Empire ruled the coastal regions to
the north and controlled a complex irrigation system.
The Chimor were once
thought to have ruled the entire coast down to the what is now Lima.
But the emerging picture suggests the Chancay remained independent from
the Chimor, Cock said.
The Chimor "didn't really
conquer the area of the Chancay," he said. "They lived with the
Chancay, they traded with the Chancay, there was influence in both
directions—but they didn't really dominate the Chancay."
Nelson's team's evidence
agrees with Cock's idea that the Chancay were independent. The team has
found no sign of the Chimor at any of the five Huaura Valley sites they
have examined.
But that freedom wasn't to last.
When the Inca reached the
Peruvian coast in 1476, they conquered both the Chimor and Chancay,
Cock said. Elites of both cultures, however, likely continued to rule,
albeit as Inca deputies.
"Most of these large
chiefdoms enter into a sort of alliance with the Inca. They exchanged
women and became relatives and went under the rule of the Inca," Cock
said. "They were too powerful to resist."
Copyright: National Geographic
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