There are 73 intact burials protected by bundles discovered in an extensive complex of cemeteries from different periods located at the foot of the Templo Pintado, in Pachacámac, south of Lima (Peru), the famous temple of the Inca period and oracle of a deity whose name, Pacha Kamaq, means “he who gives life to the earth.”
The first dates place these bodies at the time of the expansion of the Wari Empire, between 800 and 100 AD. The most surprising thing is that some of the buried individuals of both sexes wore carved wooden and ceramic masks, known as “false heads,” which were placed on the bundles.
The funerary packages were initially deposited individually and later also in groups. The state of conservation of most of them is spectacular, as explained by archaeologists from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in an article published in the magazine Archeowieschi.
The cemetery, discovered by Max Uhle – a pioneer of scientific archeology in the Andes – in the 19th century, suffered systematic destruction. First it was due to the campaign to eradicate pagan beliefs carried out during the colonial era and later because of the grave robbers.
The current excavation, led by Professor Krzysztof Makowski, focused on an area where a high wall had collapsed. It was assumed that the piles of adobe bricks would have made it difficult for thieves to access the graves.
“In the pre-Hispanic Andes no one died. “Everyone was predestined to continue living in the parallel world of the ancestors (hurin pacha),” says Makowski. The condition was that the relatives fulfill their duty and prepare the deceased to continue living.
Hence they were preserved within the bundles in the cemeteries of the Peruvian coast in the late period (between the year 800 and 1530). This duty to ensure continuity after life was taken very seriously. After all, this culture considered that it was the dead who returned to the earth every year and took care of the harvest. The abundance of water that comes down from the mountains to the desert coasts, filling the irrigation canals, also depended on them.
The exceptional state of conservation of the bodies, in addition to laboratory analysis, is providing a lot of information about the social position of men, women and children according to their kinship ties, in addition to offering new details about the care of invalids, indicators of war and domestic violence.
The work has allowed, in addition to discovering the mummies, to demonstrate that Pachacámac did not always function as a sacred city and center of worship. The site had a different function during the Wari Empire and only began to perform oracle functions and became one of the three most important temples in the central Andes after its incorporation into the Inca Empire in the 15th century.
In the Wari era, Pachacámac had no monumental sites. It was a settlement with a ceremonial platform. The funeral rites also changed completely, becoming more related to the beliefs of the north coast. The researchers rely on two wooden canes that would have been imported from Ecuador.
The staffs, decorated with images of two dignitaries with headdresses like Tiahuanaco, the civilization that settled around the Titicaca side, were found a short distance from the cemetery, in a deposit covered by a layer of fragments of the tropical shell Spondydus princeps. The style of the canes is comparable to the famous cult image known as the “idol of Pachacámac”.