Echoes from the Desert: The Chinchorro Mummies of Chile
Paragraph 1
The first humans known to have mummified their dead did so in a rather improbable spot: the driest place on Earth. The Chinchorro people settled in coastal bays of the Atacama Desert, in what is present-day Chile, around 7,000 BC and developed a technique for mummification around 5,000 BC. That's roughly 2,000 years before the ancient Egyptians. Yet, while the Egyptians were a complex civilization mummifying elite pharaohs, the Chinchorro were pre-ceramic hunter-gatherers with a more egalitarian approach to honoring the dead. Although little-known even inside Chile, the country hopes a UNESCO application for World Heritage Site status may finally get these mummies the attention they deserve.
Paragraph 2
To understand their improbable tale, I catch a 2.5-hour flight from Santiago to Chile's northernmost city of Arica. From there, I hop in a colectivo (shared taxi) for a 9-mile (15km) ride into the Azapa Valley, to visit the San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum in the small village of San Miguel de Azapa. This institution holds the mummified remains of some 300 Chinchorro people, though it only displays about 10% of its collection. That's because, at the moment, there is neither the money nor the space to showcase the mummies in a way that won't irrevocably damage them. Mummification of the Chinchorro began with babies and fetuses before progressing to adults. There were five distinct styles in about 4,000 years, though the most prevalent are the black and red mummies. Making the black mummies involved taking the dead person's body completely apart, treating it and then reassembling it, skin and all. The red ones were created by making small incisions to remove internal organs and then drying the body cavity. The former was painted in manganese and the latter in ochre.
Paragraph 3
Bernardo Arriaza, a physical anthropologist who's studied the Chinchorro mummies for more than three decades, is one of the key players documenting the global importance of the proposed world heritage site. "What we're trying to show is that we not only have the oldest evidence of intentional mummification, but it was done by pre-ceramic hunter-gatherer people in a pristine environment that remains today," he says when we meet up at his office. "These were the earliest settlers of the Atacama region, so I like to think of them as the pioneers of the desert," he continues. "They may not have been technologically advanced, but all of their complexity went into the preparation of the dead."
Paragraph 4
It was a German archeologist, Max Uhle, who first discovered the mummies a century ago near the beach in Arica that was to bestow them their name: Chinchorro. The most complex Chinchorro mummies were found on El Morro, a 455-foot (139 meters) flat-topped hill. Thirty-two of them have been preserved in situ (replete with funerary bundles, skins and other artifacts) at the small Museo de Sitio Colón 10. The modern city of Arica lies on top of a vast cemetery of the Chinchorro people. However, the oldest forms of Chinchorro mummification are found 70 miles to the south in Caleta Camarones, a beach that's barely changed in the 7,000 years since these ancient fishermen began preparing their dead.
