INCAN MUMMIES FOUND IN EXCELLENT CONDITION.

Byline: John Noble Wilford The New York Times

After climbing to the 22,000-foot summit of a volcano in northern Argentina, archeologists have found three frozen Incan mummies, 500-year-old remains of a ritual sacrifice that are so well-preserved that blood is still present in the heart and lungs.

The bodies of two girls and a boy were buried beneath five feet of rock and dirt, amid a cache of statuettes, pottery and ornate textiles associated with human sacrifices in the Incan religion. They apparently had been frozen since immediately after death. Two of the mummies were in such excellent condition, physicians said, that all their internal organs were intact. It was as if they had died only recently.

Archeologists and other scholars said the findings should yield important insights into the religion and the worship of sacred mountains in the Incan empire, which spanned most of the Andes and the western coast of South America at the time of the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. They said the mummies and artifacts were even more impressive than the discovery of the Peruvian ``Ice Maiden,'' another frozen body of an Incan sacrifice found in 1995.

The new discovery, made on Mount Llullaillaco, at Argentina's border with Chile, was announced Tuesday by Johan Reinhard, an American archeologist and mountaineer who led an American-Argentine-Peruvian expedition supported by the National Geographic Society. He described the mummies and other finds at a news conference in Salta, Argentina, and in a telephone interview.

``The preservation of the mummies is just fantastic,'' Reinhard said. ``It's eerie looking at the arms. You can still see the light hair on their arms.''

Best preserved

The archeologist said they were the best preserved of any mummy he had ever seen. In recent years, he has ascended the peaks of mountains in Argentina, Chile and Peru and come down with 18 mummies, all apparent sacrifices to the sacred mountains. Physicians so far could not establish how the three individuals, probably between 8 and 15 years old, met their deaths.

As far as the explorers could determine, the mummies and other offerings to the Incan gods appeared to have been undisturbed through the centuries. Gold, silver and shell statues, from 2 to 7 inches tall, were arranged on the burial platform just as they probably were for the ritual sacrifices. Half of the statues were clothed. Other artifacts included pottery, some of it still containing food, and bundles of alpaca textiles that appeared to establish the sacrifice victims as elite members of the society.

``The undamaged female has a beautiful, yellow geometrically designed cover laid over her outer mantle,'' Reinhard said. She also wore a feathered headdress.

Below the summit, at about the 17,000-foot level, the expedition found the stone ruins and ceramics of a camp where participants in the rituals presumably stayed before the final ascent to the peak.

``From a scientific point of view,'' said Dr. Craig Morris, an Andean anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, ``these artifacts and the base camp are at least as important as the mummies in determining the meaning of these rituals.''

The textiles, for example, were expected to provide clues to the status and ethnic origins of the young people chosen for human sacrifice, Morris said.

Richard Burger, an archeologist of early Andean civilizations at Yale University, said the preservation of the bodies gave medical scientists an opportunity to conduct more revealing tests of the diet, health and genetics of the victims. The blood should lead to DNA studies of the genetic composition of these people.

Human sacrifices

These and other recent discoveries, Burger said, were important as established cases of capac cocha, or human offerings, by the Incas because there had been a suspicion that the Spanish conquerors had exaggerated their accounts of such practices, as well as cannibalism and odd sexual mores, to justify their conquests.

Reinhard had explored Mount Llullaillaco several times before, mapping ruins and trying the trail to the top. Last month, the expedition battled driving snow and winds near the summit. ``We had several days of finding nothing,'' he said. ``I was about to give up.''

On March 16, the team found the first burial. One of the workers had to be lowered into a hole by his ankles so that he could pull the mummy out. Then they found the two others. One of the mummies, a female, had been damaged on the left side by a lightning strike, but the other two were undamaged.

Calling ahead by cellular phones, the archeologists had Argentine military vehicles waiting for them when they descended the mountain with their cargo of mummies wrapped in plastic, snow and foam insulation. The bodies still were frozen when they reached Salta, a city about 300 miles away. Some members of the team were from the Center for the Conservation of High Altitude Cultural Patrimony, in Salta. Constanza Ceruti, an Argentine archeologist, was a co-leader of the expedition.

The mummies are to remain refrigerated in Salta for further tests.

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PHOTO (color) Shown is the face of one of three 500-year-old Incan mummies displayed at a news conference Tuesday in Salta, Argentina.

Osvaldo Stigliano/El Tribuno