Ice Maiden Mummy

Sacrificed five centuries ago to a mountain god, this adolescent girl was buried with ritual objects on the summit of Nevado Ampato in the Peruvian Andes. Discovered by archaeologist Johan Reinhard in 1995, she came to be known as the Ice Maiden.



Inca Culture

A 500-year-old figurine, found buried with an Inca mummy, harks back to a time when the Inca Empire stretched from Colombia to central Chile and ruled more than 12 million people.
Rich in colorful textiles and well-ordered cities and marked by occasional human sacrifices and mummifications, the empire was conquered by the Spanish in 1532 but retains its hold on the human imagination.



Guides to the Afterworld ?

Statues of gold, silver, or rare spondylus (a type of oyster) shells were often buried with Inca human sacrifices. The figurines may have been offerings to the gods, small icons of the sacrificial victims, or guides to the afterworld.
With the exception of their feathered headdresses, the statues were usually dressed in the same manner as the bodies they accompanied. The tightly woven threads in the textiles were dyed using vegetables and minerals.



Accounting Cords

With no written language, the Inca devised a tool for recording the movement of people and goods.
The quipu is a series of colored, knotted strings. The type of knot indicated a number, and the knot’s placement signified units of 1, 10, 100, or more. All the cords hung from a main string, and their positions and colors likely signaled what was being counted—gold, corn, or other goods.



Little Llamas

Llama figurines were often buried with the Inca dead, perhaps as offerings to the gods to ensure the fertility of the Inca herds.
Llamas played an important role in Inca culture. They were the primary transportation source for the empire, which had a vast mountain road system but no wheels. Hardy animals, llamas carried all sorts of loads, from water to building materials. Llamas also provided dung (which served as fuel and fertilizer) and wool for textiles. After their deaths, llamas provided hide for leathers and meat for food.



Mummy Bundles

The Inca sometimes interred their dead in mummy bundles, layers of cloth encasing a body and personal effects. The bundles often had false heads, textiles stuffed with cotton, propped on top. Some wore masks or wigs.
These bundles (right) were part of one of the most recent Inca discoveries: hundreds of mummy bundles buried beneath a shantytown near Lima called Tupac Amaru. The site is the second largest cemetery ever excavated in Peru and the largest from a single time period.



Mummy Bundles Unwrapped

Whole families may have been interred in one mummy bundle. In Tupac Amaru, Peru, up to seven bodies have been found in a single bundle.
Personal effects such as pottery, food, and clothing were usually wrapped with the bodies. Other objects revealed the deceased’s social status. A feathered headdress, for example, might accompany a member of the upper class, and a powerful warrior might be buried with a mace.



Machu Picchu

Master engineers, the Inca built structures that are still standing today. At Machu Picchu, the most famous Inca settlement, stone terraces prevent erosion and provide level spaces for planting, making the most of difficult terrain.
The Inca’s best known building technique is that of fine masonry, in which carefully shaped stones fit together perfectly without mortar or cement. Only the most important buildings were built using this tedious and slow method.




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The Mummies of Condor Lake



Mummies can upset the best-laid plans. Last June in Leimebamba, a small town, in Peru's Department of Amazonas, the word was out: a major archaeological find at nearby Laguna de los Cóndores. I casually wangled an invitation to look at the recovered material - and found myself staring at the finest collection of Inca artifacts ever gathered in a provincial town hall.
Even a cursory inventory was mind-boggling: a large mantle so perfect it could have been woven yesterday, dozens of flawless pots, carved wooden staffs, wooden beakers, decorated gourds, an exotic carved ritual drinking vessel, several quipus. Quipus! - those rarely-found Inca recording devices made of knotted cords. Found in c
ontext, they could add much to our knowledge of Inca culture. Moreover, a number of the artifacts were clearly either not Inca, or Inca with a strong dash of other influences. One pot even showed clear signs of Spanish colonial influence; Chimu in style, it displayed a green glaze not used in Peru before the Conquest.




On the floor were four mummy bundles, tightly bound in plain, cream-colored cotton. They, too, showed no signs of decay. Up in the mountains behind us the tombs still stood with their contents largely intact.


All previous plans were off. Next day I was in Leimebamba again. A hint of mummy fever hung in the air. Tiny but unmistakable dollar signs glinted in the eyes of some townsfolk, amidst the genuine friendliness of what may someday be called The Old Leimebamba - the way it was Before the Mummies. The hastily-formed (post-Mummy) local INC committee charged me 20 soles to use a long, muddy track to a place hardly anyone went to. To them it must feel like winning the lottery.


Next morning, I rode a mule up a winding dirt trail leading into the hills east of Leimebamba, with a local wrangler named Leoncio Cotrina. This part of Peru has a long rainy season and a short dry one. Leimebamba is at a pleasant 2100 ms., so the hills around us were green and forested, with many cleared pastures. Later we climbed through reddish-brown grasslands and began to hit more and more pockets of deep black mud. Often the mules floundered up to their bellies, bucking and panicking, and we had to leap off their backs to drier ground. We ate lunch at a high pass above 3,000 ms., and then began to drop down into another watershed. The mud got steadily worse, with frequent dismounting, the patches seeming to go on for kilometers. At one quagmire we encountered Homer Ullilen, the 25-year-old owner of the homestead at Laguna de los Cóndores.Ullilen was involved in the brouhaha surrounding the discovery of the mummies. His hired hands had discovered the site, in November 1996, while he was away traveling. They began looting the mausoleums, ripping apart mummy bundles and scattering artifacts in a search for gold. This continued intermittently, in mounting frustration, for several months. They never did find any gold, but in April 1997 word leaked out in Leimebamba that a major "tapado" had been discovered at Laguna de los Cóndores, and the rest is history. Or the first chapter of a history. Since then the mummies and their attendant artifacts have been removed from the site to a conservation laboratory in Leimebamba, where scientific studies have begun.


Onward. As the trail got worse and the day grew old the exhausted mules began to earn every vile epithet and simile ever heaped on their species. Narrowly avoiding a kick like a mule as I approached to remount one last time, I was relieved to see the rancho Perla Escondida in the distance.



Perla Escondida. The Hidden Pearl. Did Homer Ullilen's father, Julio, have some prophetic vision when he named the land he hacked out of cloud forest here? Where was the pearl? Nineteen years later they found it, in the trees, on the cliffs, above the lake. A line of ancient tombs, containing the mummies of more than 200 dead men, women and children with many tales to tell. For archaeologists it is, to date, the jewel in the crown of Chachapoyan antiquity.
Our journey was not over yet. Next morning we set out on foot, guided by Homer Ullilen. He led us up the moraine, and from the top we saw for the first time the lake, and beyond it the great mountainous cliff along its southern shore, where the mausoleums were built. Through my binoculars I could see patches of what seemed like red paint, the square black hole of a window, and some spindly wooden structures.It would still take us two hours to reach the site, circling the east shore of the lake. First we had to walk along the cleared ridge top of the moraine, passing some stone mortars which the Ullilens had found years ago while clearing the forest. Subsequent investigations revealed the foundations of some 200 Chachapoyan structures here, presumably the former home of those buried in the tombs. In pre-Hispanic times this must have been a very remote spot, and one wonders why a large settlement was built here.

Gönderen

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Did You Know ?

Mountains of refuge Crisscrossed by deep gorges and festooned with waterfalls nearly a thousand feet high, the Cordillera de Vilcabamba stretches 160 miles (260 kilometers) northwest of Cusco, the old Inca capital, into the rugged heart of Peru. In 1537 Manco Inca, one of the last Inca kings, took what was left of his army into the safety of these cliffs and crags after an unsuccessful attempt to recapture Cusco from Spanish hands. A hundred years earlier, the greatest Inca emperor of all, Pachacuti, had built a summer retreat at Machu Picchu, tucked under the spires of the Vilcabamba Range. Manco Inca also needed a retreat, not to escape the summer heat but the guns and horses of the Spanish, a place so inaccessible he could launch forays against Peru's conquerors with impunity. He found this some place within the range. From deep within his mountain stronghold he sent out raiding parties to harass the Spanish, reclaiming Inca treasures and fostering rebellion. The Spanish launched attacks against him, but the harsh terrain made their horses useless. On foot they became easy targets for guerrilla fighters hurling boulders and shooting arrows down on them from mountainside bunkers. Eight years passed before Manco Inca discovered that even his Vilcabamba fortress couldn't protect him from treachery within.After Francisco Pizarro was murdered in 1541, several of his assassins, all Spaniard's seeking to create their own chain of power in Peru, fled to Manco Inca, who welcomed the hated Pizarro's killers. They enjoyed the safety and hospitality of the Incas' Vilcabamba capital for three years, probably until Peru's new viceroy sent letters encouraging them to return to Cusco under his protection. A chronicle records what happened next. At a time when Manco Inca's troops were busy raiding, the assassins killed once more, attacking the Inca king from behind and stabbing him again and again. He lingered for three days, long enough to hear that he had been avenged. His attackers, cornered in a building that had been set on fire, were either burned alive or were killed attempting to flee the flames. The independent Inca state survived for 28 more years under the rule of three of Manco Inca's sons. Then in May 1572, a force led by 250 Spanish fighters set out from Cusco determined to breach the Incas' defenses and capture Tupac Amaru, the last Inca king. The battles were fierce, but this time the Spanish succeeded in reaching the Incas' mountain capital. They discovered the city burned and the king gone. After pursuing him for more then 300 miles (500 kilometers) across rivers and jungle and on into the Amazon, they caught up with him, put him on trial in Cusco, and beheaded him in front of his followers. With his death the mighty Inca reign ended.

Jeanne E. Peters