A living treasure in ancient bodies.

Under the direction of anthropologist Sonia Guillen, Peru's Centro Mallqui is a leading center for the preservation of mummies, and a resource for diverse biological research

The village of El Algarrobal, population twelve, sits on a shelf of sand above the green ribbon of the valley floor. Steep walls of tawny, crumbling sandstone rise to an opal sky, enclosing this valley of the Osmore River in quiet solitude--a long, thin oasis in the endless desert of southern Peru. Alongside the road is a white-painted church (one mass each year), a small olive-crushing plant, a municipal office, and a community store. Two buildings stand out in this otherwise spare ensemble--modern structures that incorporate a flavor of traditional desert styling with pre-Columbian hum mingbird motifs. They are the Museo Municipal and the Centro Mallqui--one of the foremost centers for the recovery and study of mummies in Peru, and by extension, the world.

Why did Centro Mallqui (in Quechua, mallqui means mummy) settle in this serene but remote corner of the country, eight miles from the nearest town of Ilo? Its director, Sonia Guillen, explains: "Many favorable conditions come together here, most importantly the presence of numerous graveyards of the Chiribaya culture. The low humidity and almost complete absence of rain have left the mummies, and the textiles and artifacts entombed with them, in a remarkably fine state of preservation. The climatic disruptions of El Nino tend to have had less impact here than in better known sites to the north."

Add to that the practical issue of land, made available by the authorities in Ilo, and the urgent need to counteract the activities of tomb robbers, and the choice of El Algarrobal becomes a natural one.

Guillen studied medicine for two years in Lima before switching to archaeology, later earning a doctoral degree in biological anthropology at the University of Michigan. She found that there was no clearly defined career path for newly qualified specialists in the conservation of organic remains and worked to create her own opportunities, acquiring formidable management and resource-juggling skills along the way.

Founded in 1994, Centro Mallqui is sponsored by the private Bioanthropology Foundation Peru, a U.S.-based, family-owned foundation. The most exacting of the work is entrusted to a young conservator, Fran Cole, from Surrey, England, and a local weaver, Rosa Choque, whose intimate knowledge of textiles has been augmented by training in conservation. Around the various laboratories and storerooms floor-to-ceiling rack shelving is packed with cartons, each labeled in great and inscrutable detail. The center's small staff also includes an implausibly friendly guard dog and several cats to deter rodents and lizards.

Centro Mallqui has developed as a place where local people can learn some of the very exacting techniques of conservation, and expertise can be exported to other sites, which can in turn become self-supporting. It is at one of these sites that we gain our first insight to the problems faced and the obstacles to be overcome in this valuable work.

After meeting up with Guillen in Lima, we traveled together to Chachapoyas, the remote capital of a mountainous, wooded province between the Andes and the Amazon forest, some eighty miles north of Cajamarca. This being the rainy season, the most reliable means of transport is by the weekly Accion Civil flight operated by the Peruvian armed forces to isolated parts of the country. Our arrival in Chachapoyas represented no more than a staging post to the even more distant small town of Leimebamba. But we enjoyed a brief rest here, while Guillen addressed the practical matter of the purchase of electrical equipment and conservation materials needed at our destination.

Our country bus, filled to overflowing with people, baggage, and some livestock, set out along a wet dirt road. Our stout driver gazed grimly through a cracked windshield at the winding, pot-holed road ahead. At landslides, we disembarked to cross on foot--and once were obliged to teeter over a temporary two-log bridge while flood waters rushed below--to regain our vehicle on the other side. For five hours we continued beside the swollen waters of the Utcubamba River before arriving, safe but somewhat shaken, at the Leimebamba outpost of Centro Mallqui.

Seven months earlier, Guillen had led a team of specialists to a beautiful jungle lake, Laguna de los Condores, a hazardous twelve-hour journey on horseback followed by three hours more on foot. Nearly a year before their arrival, looters, or huaqueros, had discovered six stone burial chambers, or chullpas, built like small houses into a cliff face above the lake. They had turned out the contents of the tombs, ripped open mummies, and scattered priceless remains and artifacts across the rock ledge and the wet slopes below. Several of the looters had been arrested and their work of destruction temporarily halted, but all of the material had then to be carefully retrieved, cataloged, and removed from the site to prevent further looting and to limit the damage already caused by the weather.

Guillen and her party spent two gruelling months collecting some two hundred mummies and a large haul of assorted artifacts, which were safely stored in a house in Leimebamba under conditions of controlled temperature and humidity. We now stood in this makeshift room, gazing in wonder at the carefully stored bundles, wrapped in protective white linen. Their scientific value was immense--Guillen's team had completed the recovery while most of the mummies were still, given the circumstances, in excellent condition. The size of the collection and its state of preservation are probably unprecedented in this wet and humid region.

Conservators had been hard at work before our arrival, and much cataloging and initial conservation work had already been carried out. The few mummies that survived intact were incredibly small and light, wrapped in elaborately woven textiles and, in some cases, with a stylized, embroidered face, making them look just a little like Russian babushka dolls.

Most mummies in Peru are "natural," with their internal organs still in place, but the majority of these, belonging to the Chachapoya, had been eviscerated and prepared with cotton padding in facial cavities and, possibly, the application of preserving substances to the skin. They had been tightly bound in a fetal position with their hands raised to their faces, and the joints of the hip, knee, and ankle dislocated to make the corpses as small and compact as possible.

Of these funereal preparations the seventeenth-century chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega would observe, "I did not succeed in finding out how they went about embalming, nor with what ingredients: the Indians hid this from me, just as they did from the Spaniards, or maybe they themselves had all of them already forgotten these things when I questioned them .... The bodies were so light that the Indians carried them in their arms with no difficulty, from one house to the other, to show them to the gentlemen who wanted to see them."

On our first morning, I had the job of supervising the village electrician, helping him to run cables across the mummies' room to improve the lighting, tiptoeing gingerly around the bundles. When the electrician lost his insulating tape, nothing could convince his that it was he, and not the mummies, who was to blame.

According to the evidence given by some of the huaqueros, the mummies had been found carefully arranged to face outward, across the lagoon. They belonged to that brief period when the Chachapoya people lived under Inca domination, and there was evidence that the Inca had cleared the tombs of their original inhabitants (perhaps as a statement of power and control over the conquered people) and allowed their reuse by future generations.

The fiercely independent Chachapoya made their home in the dry tropical forest and high grasslands of the mountains east of the Maranon River, in rugged country descending toward the Amazon basin. They developed from about 900 A.D., constructing dense settlements of circular stone houses within defensive walls, on hilltops and ridges. Many of the houses are decorated with friezes in the form of zigzags, rhomboids, or frets. The total population of the territory may have been around half a million. Apart from the important site of Kuelap, where there are ceremonial areas and a scale suggesting imperial ambitions, the settlements appear to reflect related but divided population centers, perhaps clans or chief-doms, living in competition and, frequently, in conflict with each other. When threatened by aggression from outside, as when the Inca Tupac Amaru brought his great army here, the Chachapoya presented a united front. They put up a stern resistance to conquest and also revolted several times. According to Garcilaso, "As soon as the Inca had received his reinforcements he crossed their frontiers and the war began with equal tenacity on both sides. The Incas were determined to continue their advance and the Chachas to die, if need be, rather than give up their independence."

Even though evidence has been thoroughly muddled, archaeologists have been able to make considerable sense of the recovered data. Many of the ceramics and textiles exhibit the strong influence of the coastal Chimu culture, and some are more suggestive of lowland tropical forest influences. This is explained by the Inca policy of population shuffling, particularly important in the case of people as warlike and troublesome as the Chachapoya. The Inca exiled large numbers of them to distant parts of the empire and brought in new settlers from already conquered territories, in this case mainly Chimu, to dilute cultural integrity and reduce the threat of revolt.

Since the recovery, rain has made the trail to the lake impassable. So I managed to complete the climb to the nearby Chachapoya site of La Congona, steeply uphill from Leimebamba and across trails knee deep in mud. My guide cleared the thorny undergrowth from the final section of the path with a machete, and I arrived breathless among ruins overgrown, damp, and mossy beneath the overhanging trees. La Congona is a small site but an evocative one, believed to be unique for the variety of its decorative stonework.

A few days later I arranged to visit Kuelap--another long ascent by mule trail, the circuitous motor road being closed by landslides. At the final rise, a cliff, or a broad strata of rock stretches across the full width of the summit. Closer inspection showed this to be a massive man-made wall, sixty feet high, with slitlike entrances narrowing like funnels to little more than the width of a single person. Within these doughty defenses were more great walls, many circular houses, and a ceremonial plaza. The view from this 9,850-foot summit, over the green rounded hills and folds of the Cordillera Central, was breathtaking.

Back in Ilo, an emergency rescue job had just been completed. A new water pipeline to the town was being laid in a deep trench, which uncovered a hitherto unknown Chiribaya graveyard. Gerardo Carpio, director of the Museo Municipal, was working full time with a small group of archaeologists to recover burial material and bones literally in the path of the bulldozer. By way of a break from his exertions, Carpio drove me up to one of the larger burial sites, known as Chiribaya Alta.

After the disintegration of the Tiwanaku empire, several local groups inhabited the fertile valleys of southern Peru and northern Chile. In the Osmore valley, between present-day Moquegua and the sea at Ilo, the Chiribaya culture emerged about one thousand years ago, expanding into the neighboring valleys of Tambo and Azapa, in Chile, and upward to elevations of about eight thousand feet above sea level. The Chiribaya appear to have been peaceful, characterized by densely populated settlements, refined textiles made from the wool of camelids, and ceramics that combine elements of the earlier Tiwanaku styles with their own. They hunted, fished, and farmed the valley bottom, cultivating maize, yucca, beans, squashes, and many fruits. Coca was also grown here or nearby. Houses of mud and cane were built on terraces above the valley floor, and some cemeteries were also located here, as well as in quebrados on the valley sides and on the dry hilltops. To date there is little evidence of either ceremonial or religious building. The Chiribaya were in advanced decline when the Inca empire reached these latitudes and although there are some Inca remains, the area seems not to have figured strongly in Inca plans.

On a high, dry bluff overlooking the fertile valley, a graveyard stretched fully a half-mile across, enclosed by a low, semicircular wall. Sun-bleached human and llama bones and eight-hundred-year-old textile and pottery fragments were scattered across a vast field of sand-filled craters--pits excavated by looters over the last several years.

An afternoon breeze breathed hotly across the desert sands as we looked down upon the hidden valley that has sustained human life continuously for thousands of years. The deep, silvery green of the riverside below was a continuous plantation of olives, trees that were brought here by the Spanish some four hundred years ago. In the preceding centuries it would have been a patchwork of intensively cultivated maize, bean, and fruit fields, with hundreds of cane-walled houses built on terraces above the cultivation level. Carpio explained how the dead were interred in stone-lined chambers along with pottery grave goods, carefully placed to face across the valley toward the rising sun. The tombs were covered with wood or stone before being sealed with a great deal of mud and covered with sand. One sector comprised almost entirely the graves of llamas, each sacrificed by a blow to the head.

The Chiribaya burials are more or less contemporary with those of the Chachapoya, but the method of interment and treatment is quite different. The Chiribaya buried their dead in a natural sitting position and usually left the organs intact. Scientists are discovering that some form of preservative might have been applied to the skin, and mummies may have been removed years after burial, redressed, and possibly displayed for ceremonial purposes.

On many of the mummy bundles a guinea pig was fastened to the chest, and a variable number of woven pouches or folded textiles containing coca leaves placed around the neck. These sacrifices are more or less generous, depending on the social status of the deceased. Guinea pig, or cuy, was a valued source of protein in ancient times (and a popular dish today), while the mildly narcotic coca was of great ceremonial importance.

From a site a little to the north of Chiribaya Alfa, archaeologist Jane Wheeler, from San Marcos University in Lima, is studying mummified llamas and alpacas sacrificed one thousand years ago, with wool freer than cashmere--fifteen microns thick compared to sixteen to twenty for cashmere. That such a valuable resource could have been allowed to become extinct seems incredible, but scientists speculate that prize herds, specially bred for wool, were later lost to the invading Spaniards, who tended to refer to all camelids as "sheep" and ate their way through prodigious numbers of them.

The wealth of Centro Mallqui is the great size of its collection and its potential for research. "There is little gold or jewelry here," Guillen explains, "but we have whole populations of bodies. The scope for studies in biological sciences is tremendous."

Specialists have come here to try to find evidence of diabetes (a disease from which native Peruvians are free); neurologists have come to look at nerves recovered from spinal columns; and Japanese scientists have been evaluating a virus that produces a type of leukemia, present here since antiquity and found in similar form in traditional communities in Japan.

Meanwhile, Guillen has been busy setting up meetings with an X-ray technician in Leimebamba to scan mummy bundles; the mayors of both that village and of Ilo regarding a prospective museum site; various tradesmen and local officials; as well as each of the center's employees. In between visits to Ilo and Leimebamba, she manages to accommodate lecture tours to the United States and conferences in both the Americas and Europe. It is a tough schedule but then, this work is beyond price. As Guillen says, even in museums the tissues and organs of mummies will lose their integrity if not properly conserved, and the biological information they contain can so easily be lost forever. Defining the role of Centro Mallqui and her own goals, she adds: "We aim to make these collections available for scientific use--indefinitely."

Richard Robinson is a freelance writer based in Newbury, Berkshire, England, and a previous contributor to Americas. Inquiries about the Centro Mallqui and offers of support are welcome. Please write to: Casilla 63, Ilo, Peru. Tel.: [phone]; FAX: [phone]; e-mail: [e-mail].