By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
 

Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of Inca mummies buried in dusty graves beneath a windblown Peruvian shantytown,
offering an unprecedented look at the life and culture of South America's premier civilization on the eve of Spanish conquest.

The Puruchuco-Huaquerones site, at the base of desert foothills on the eastern edge of metropolitan Lima, has yielded the
remains of at least 2,200 individuals, many of them buried in fabric-clad bundles containing more than one body and shaped to
resemble humans.

Lead archaeologist Guillermo Cock, of Peru's National Institute of Culture, said the dead were buried during a 75-year period
ending perhaps in 1540 -- five years after the Spaniards founded the settlement that became modern-day Lima.

"In all, there may have been as many as 10,000 bundles containing 15,000 people," Cock told reporters at a news conference
at the headquarters of National Geographic, which funded part of the research. "It is a superb cross-section of the Inca people
in a very short time period."

Cock said that although Puruchuco is only the second-biggest concentration of mummies ever found in Peru, it carries
enormous significance because it served as a cemetery only during the "Late Horizon" period, making it an immensely rich time
capsule for the pinnacle of Incan culture. The Inca of South America, the Mesoamerican Maya and the Aztecs of Mexico are
regarded as the three great pre-Columbian civilizations of the Western Hemisphere.

Cock said Puruchuco contained individuals from "no more than two generations," and included men, women and children from
all social classes, with causes of death ranging "all over the map," including human sacrifice, trauma, malnutrition, anemia and
probably tuberculosis.

"We have what they call in sociology the perfect sample," Cock said. He said archaeologists have unwrapped only three of
about 345 mummy bundles recovered from the site, and acknowledged that the work would take decades to complete.

Still, he said, early research has led to new conclusions about the Inca, whose empire began in the southern mountains near
Cuzco in 1438 and swept north and south to dominate the Andean cordillera from modern-day Ecuador to southern Chile.

Until now, Cock noted, most archaeologists had regarded the Inca as an elite caste who imposed an imperial "superstructure"
over local populations. But Puruchuco artifacts show a mixture of artistic traditions, he said, suggesting that the Inca were
mingling their own culture with local styles, and may have been in the process of creating a unique synthesis when they were
interrupted by conquest.

Also, said archaeologist Brian Bauer, an Inca specialist from the University of Illinois at Chicago, such a massive number of
mummies "is really a key in studying the health of ancient peoples."

Until 1989, Puruchuco was little more than a barren stretch of desert at the base of the Andean foothills. Archaeologists had
found one burial bundle in 1956, but the discovery was given little significance. "That's not surprising," Bauer said. "There are
cemeteries up and down the Peru coast, and very few of them have been systematically sampled or surveyed."

Looters routinely pillaged the site, but interest only began to kindle in 1989, when 340 squatter families, fleeing guerrilla warfare
in the mountains, settled on Puruchuco and built the town of Tupac Amaru.

The looting stopped, Cock said, because the new arrivals regarded the land as sacred, but the larger the settlement became,
the more damage was done to the mummies buried below. By the time the Peruvian government opened formal excavation in
1999, about 1,200 Tupac Amaru families were dumping 40,000 gallons of sewage and other liquids each day. "In some
sectors, the individuals were rotting as if they had died 30 to 45 days ago," Cock said. "Not a pretty sight."

But in what Cock described as a "race against time" because of decomposition and impending construction, the archaeological
team enlisted local help in cutting trenches and digging excavation pits right through the heart of town. The richest source of elite
burials turned out to be beneath the schoolyard.

Cock said the dead appeared to have been "naturally embalmed" by being wrapped in fabric or raw cotton and buried upright
in pits filled with sand, gravel and crushed ceramic -- a mix designed to leach moisture from a corpse in as short a time as
possible. Many of the bundles came to be known as falsas cabezas, or "false heads," because they had stuffed cotton heads
perched on top to give them a human shape.

The preservation was remarkable. One individual, known as the "cotton king," was swaddled in 300 pounds of raw cotton
along with a baby. The skin of the man's hands was intact, as were his sack of coca leaves and brick of quicklime -- chewed in
combination even today as a stimulant.

Cock said that many of the falsas weighed hundreds of pounds and that some contained as many as seven individuals --
perhaps the bundled equivalent of a family crypt.

Between 44 percent and 46 percent of the unearthed dead were children younger than 12, but physical anthropologist Sloan
Williams, a Peru specialist from the University of Illinois at Chicago, said, "The infant death rate in prehistoric times is typically
almost 50 percent -- this is not outside the norm."

                                 © 2002