Move over Ramses: Chilean mummies added to UNESCO World Heritage List

Recently, UNESCO, assessing their global importance, included the Chinchorro mummies and the places where they were found in the list of World Cultural Heritage.

The list includes three places where the burials of mummies were found: two of them are located in the current territory of the Chilean city of Arica, one - in the village of Desembocadura de Camarones, according to the Daily Mail . All of these sites have preserved evidence of the culture of marine hunter-gatherers who lived on the arid and inhospitable coast of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile from about 5450 to 890 BC, the organization said in a statement. NS. There are cemeteries with the oldest known examples of artificial mummification known to archaeologists, as well as bodies that have survived due to environmental conditions. Chinchorro mummies reflect the fundamental role of the dead in local society.

Chinchorro mummies were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century. They are over 7,000 years old - that is, they are about 2,000 years older than their much more famous Egyptian counterparts. The Chinchorro were fishermen and hunter-gatherers who lived where the Atacama Desert and the Pacific Ocean meet - in what is now southern Peru and northern Chile.

More than 300 Chinchorro mummies have been discovered today. The process of mummification was the removal of internal organs, intestines and soft tissues, after which the skin was removed, and then the body was re-"assembled" using sticks and animal hair (there is a version according to which the chinchorro were cannibals and the flesh removed from the body was eaten). A thick head of black hair was sewn onto the scalp, and then the corpses were painted red or black using dirt, pigments, manganese and iron oxide. One of the mummies bore a dashed mustache-like line above the upper lip, probably the oldest tattoo in the Western Hemisphere. Unlike the Egyptians, who only mummified members of the royal family, the Chinchorro dismembered and “collected” the bodies of men, women and children, regardless of their social background.

It is not yet clear what purpose mummification served in the culture or cosmology of Chichorro. There is a version that this was a way not to let the dead, which, due to the dry climate, did not decompose, frighten the living. Another version is that mummification could be an emotional reaction of parents to the death of children: due to the large amount of arsenic in the water, the infant mortality rate in chinchorro was very high. According to the findings, the children were subjected to the most complicated mummification procedure: they were dressed up and painted using the most sophisticated techniques.

A complete list of new UNESCO World Heritage Sites can be seen on the website.