Looters had destroyed the bodies but had spared the heads, which were covered in braids of thick black hair. That level of preservation has long attracted looters and more recently anthropologists such as Sonia Guillén, a mummy expert who has picked through the remains for information about Chiribaya culture.īetween 19 Guillén and her colleagues discovered two mummified Chiribaya skulls while investigating the desert a few miles east of the port city Ilo. Archaeologists have discovered dozens of grave sites filled with pottery, jewelry, and well-preserved clothing and textiles. But a climate hostile to new settlement created ideal conditions for preserving the past. The dry, dusty landscape has been only sparsely populated since. In the 1500s conflict and disease brought by Spanish conquistadors finished off the Chiribaya. The relative affluence of the Chiribaya lasted for hundreds of years, until a series of invasions-ending with a conquest by the Inca Empire-nearly wiped out their culture. They also practiced the art of mummification, just as other South American civilizations had done since 5000 BCE, around 2,000 years before the Egyptians started preserving their dead. Amid this bounty of resources the Chiribaya created pottery and textiles with intricate geometric designs and inscribed massive geoglyphs into hillsides with stone. More than 1,000 years ago the Chiribaya civilization thrived here by fishing along the coast cultivating potatoes, maize, and other crops in river valleys raising llamas as pack animals and cuyes (guinea pigs) as meat. Every so often El Niño drowns the land with its relentless rain, turning sand into mud and washing away the few towns that exist in this arid landscape. The region is almost entirely barren except for ephemeral lomas, bright green oases sustained by fog banks that move with the weather. In southern Peru, near the Pacific coast, powerful winds blow sand across high desert plateaus.
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