Under a ruined citadel on Peru’s arid northern coast, archaeologists have discovered an ancient mausoleum untouched by centuries of conquest and plunder by the Inca, Spanish colonizers, and generations of looters, officials announced this week.
The site, Chan Chan, whose ruins include giant adobe brick ruins, has been excavated for decades. But researchers had never before found an undisturbed tomb at the city, which was the capital of the Chimu kingdom that ruled much of Peru’s coast before the Inca.
The tombs contained 38 bodies, archaeologists said, adding that the scale of the mausoleum — nearly 55 feet on each side and 16 feet high — and the scores of artifacts within suggest the people buried there were members of the Chimu elite. The team of Peruvian archaeologists said that the tombs were about 600 years old, which would date them to just before or during the Inca conquest of the region, in the mid-1400s.
“This is the discovery of the decade in terms of it’s the very first time that, as archaeologists, we are able to see an elite Chimu burial,” said Gabriel Prieto, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, who was not involved in the research.
The Peruvian archaeologists realized only slowly that they had found something different, as they removed sand, soil and debris from the tomb’s entrance one centimeter at a time.
“It was a feeling of anxiety and urgency, to know if we were really in front of a chamber that had never been looted,” said Jorge Meneses, the archaeologist responsible for excavations.
By the time they had cleared about 40 centimeters from the door, he said, the team could peer inside with a flashlight. They saw a series of funerary bundles, still safe from thieves after hundreds of years.
“In that moment we realized that the chamber had not been looted,” he said.
The excavation, near the town of Trujillo, has taken months and is still going on. It has revealed a stairway that descends eight feet into the middle of the mausoleum, where one chamber is flanked on each side by a larger room. One person was buried in the central chamber; the eastern room was nearly empty; and the western room held a trove of artifacts and the remains of about 20 people. Eighteen more have been found elsewhere in the complex.
The skeletal remains in the central chamber had red pigment on the skull and some other bones, Dr. Meneses said, as did two skeletons atop the funeral platform. Archaeologists say the pigment may be cinnabar, another clue suggesting the remains were from the Chimu elite.
Many of the remains had ear ornaments, silver- or copper-plated necklaces, or jewelry made of quartz, shells and semiprecious stones. The researchers also found a large number of metal weapons, heavy beads and a wooden chest containing colorful textiles decorated with images of seabirds and monkeys.
“It’s really like a treasure chest,” Dr. Prieto said.
He said that the design of the tombs and evidence from Chimu art suggests that the mausoleums were “designed to be open.” Chimu people would go in and out, he said, depositing bodies or offerings and taking human remains “out of those burials to be placed on plazas and venerated as ancestors.”
The discovery raises many questions, archaeologists said, and could significantly bolster knowledge about the Chimu. At about nine square miles, Chan Chan was the biggest city of the Americas in its time, with gardens, plazas, pyramids and mausoleums. The tomb could shed light on Chimu practices as well as on their relations with the Inca and other cultures to the north and south.
The Peruvian authorities said the bodies were still being analyzed, and have not yet revealed any details about the dead, including ages, sex, where they were born or how they may have died. (Nearly 140 child skeletons and the remains of 200 llamas were found at another Chimu site in 2019, possibly in an act of mass human sacrifice during a disastrous El Niño.)
“What is clear to us so far is that these people were part of the elite or were associated with the elite,” said Henry Luis Gayoso, the head of the project at Chan Chan and an official in Peru’s Ministry of Culture.
The excavation could provide a wealth of information to archaeologists about a transformative moment in the ancient Americas as one kingdom faced off with a rising empire, said Robyn Cutright, an anthropologist at Centre College who was not involved in the research.
The bodies, the objects and the design of the mausoleum itself could offer clues about how the Chimu and the Inca interacted. While museums and collections around the world hold Chimu objects, including those that appear to be from royal tombs, “this really is a great opportunity to see something we haven’t see before, a royal tomb undisturbed at Chan Chan,” she said.
“You can see something cool in a museum that a looter sold to a collector,” she said, “but this is the real meat of how archaeologists tell stories.”
The post An Ancient Mausoleum, Untouched by Looters, Is Found Under Peru’s Sands appeared first on New York Times.
