Surprise! The world's oldest mummies are not in Egypt
The first humans known to have mummified their dead did so in a rather improbable spot: the driest place on Earth.
"It's a very sacred collection because the majority of the items are related to the ceremony of death," explains curator and conservationist Mariela Santos, as we peer over the mummified remains of a young woman whose face is hidden behind an evocative clay mask.Mummification began with babies and fetuses before progressing to adults. There were five distinct styles over a span of about 4,000 years, though Santos says the most prevalent are the black and red mummies.
Why, I wonder, don't the Chinchorro mummies carry the same cache as their Egyptian brethren? Santos reckons it may be because Chileans themselves haven't given much value to the treasures along their northernmost frontier.Chile's proposal for World Heritage Site status for the Chinchorro sites is expected to be in UNESCO's hands by as early as 2020.
"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."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.
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