The Chinchorro Mummies: The World's Oldest (and Greatest)!

Okay, maybe not the greatest officially, but I think they're pretty spectacular.  :)  

What am I talking about?  The Chinchorro mummies, which are the world's oldest mummies, the inspiration for today's post, and the reason I work in northern Chile.  This post is going to discuss the people that created these mummies, and this post is dedicated to my amazing friends and colleagues in Chile.

The Chinchorro people inhabited the South Central Andes with concentrations in the Atacama Desert.  Their settlements were spread from the modern day cities of Antofagasta, Chile to Ilo, Peru.  They inhabited the region during the Archaic Period (10,000 B.C.-3500 B.C.) from 7000-1000 B.C.  The Chinchorro culture and mummies were first discovered along the Arica coast on the Chinchorro Beach by German archaeologist Max Uhle in early 20^th century.  Other individuals who excavated Chinchorro mummies during the early 20^th century were Carl Skottsberg and Ancker Nielsen.  Skottsberg worked with Uhle in 1924 in and around Arica, Chile, while Nielsen excavated Chinchorro mummies around the city of Iquique, just south of Arica, in 1920 and 1925. 

In the 1960s archaeologist Lautaro Nuñez hypothesized that the Chinchorro were a hunter-gatherer society, and in the 1970s Bente Bittman and Juan Munizaga investigated the meaning and purposes behind the Chinchorro mummification practices.  It was Virgilio Schiappacasse and Hans Niemeyer who first started excavating in the Camarones Valley in the 1980s, discovering several new Chinchorro mummies and stating that the mummification practices began in that valley.  They also determined that the first individuals artificially mummified were four infants, leading to one of the prevailing hypotheses concerning the origins of their mummification practices.

The Chinchorro are recognized as an egalitarian, preceramic culture.  The Chinchorro peoples were fishermen who subsisted mostly on marine plants and animals, such as shellfish, seaweed, sea lion, sea birds, and fish. Marine resources made up 80% of their diet, while terrestrial plants and animals each made up 10% of their diet respectively.  Their fishing technology consisted of harpoons with lithic and bone points, shell fishhooks, vegetal fishing lines and nets, and lithic weights.

There is evidence that shows the Chinchorro were a semi-sedentary people.  This evidence includes house structures, middens, hearths, and cemeteries.  Archaeological data suggest the Chinchorro lived in semi-circular house structures which were easily taken down.  Large and numerous shell middens are found near these dwellings, further suggesting semi-permanent settlement, as well as hearths that were identified due to the ashen and burnt remains found in association with these features.  The mummies and cemeteries of the Chinchorro were an anomaly to scholars who claimed the Chinchorro were a mobile hunter-gatherer society, but these characteristics are now used as evidence to support the hypothesis that the Chinchorro were a semi-sedentary society.

The Chinchorro are best known for their mummies, which are the world’s oldest.  The Chinchorro practiced both natural and artificial/anthropogenic mummification found in equal representation.  The Chinchorro morticians were very skilled anthropogenic mummification.  Typically, the morticians would first remove the head and extremities, carefully remove the skin from the body, dry the skin and extremities, remove the internal organs and muscle tissues, fill in the body with vegetal matter, clay, and feathers, reinforce the body with sticks, replace the skin, head and extremities, remodel the genitals and face with clay, place a wig of human hair on the deceased’s head, and paint the bodies.  They would then bury the mummies with a variety of grave goods of utilitarian nature, such as fishing implements.

There are several different types of anthropogenic mummies: the black, red, bandage, mud coated, statuette, and natural mummies.  The black mummies are the oldest and most complicated artificial mummies created and are so called because they were painted with black manganese paint.  The red mummies are less complicated than the black mummies in that there was less care and preparation used in their creation, and they were painted with a mixture of iron oxide and manganese paint.  The iron oxides gave the paint a reddish appearance.  The bandage mummies are artificial mummies wrapped in human or animal strips of skin and treated similarly to the red mummies.  These mummies’ bodies were painted red with the face painted black.  Mud coated mummies were created through the smoking of the body and the covering of the body with mud or cement upon burial.  Statuette mummies are believed to be either dolls or representations of fetuses. They were molded out of clay and had individual face masks.  Some of these mummies have been x-rayed and both human fetal and animal bones have been imaged.  Others appear to be without bones.  Natural mummies are desiccated because of natural processes with no intentional human manipulation.  The hot, arid Atacama Desert is ideal for creating natural mummies.

There are currently several different hypothesizes to explain why the Chinchorro began to mummify their dead.  These include the “Environmental Factors,” “Spiritual Concerns,” “Adoration of Children,” and the “Arsenic Hypothesis.”  The “Environmental Factors” hypothesis puts forward the idea that the Chinchorro people created artificial mummies after observing the environmental processes that led to natural mummification.  The “Spiritual Concerns” hypothesis posits that anthropogenic mummies were created out of a need to fulfill a spiritual/ideological need among the living Chinchorro people.  The “Adoration of Children” is contingent on the dating of the four child mummies found in the Camarones Valley and puts forward the idea that the death of Chinchorro children required the living to assuage their grief by mummifying the children.  The practice was then expanded to include adults at a later time.  The “Arsenic” hypothesis expands on the previous hypothesis and associates the death of the Chinchorro children with arsenic poisoning.

More information about the Chinchorro can be found at the following:

http://momiaschinchorro.cl/joomla/

References available upon request or by reading my Masters Thesis.

Rock of Ages: A Review of Petrographs, Petroglyphs, and Petroforms

First off, I apologize for my brief hiatus from the blog.  I was moving cross country, and it was this trip that inspired today's blog post, which focuses on rock art.  There are several types of rock art in existence, with three primary types being petrographs, petroglyphs, and petroforms.

Petrographs are paintings on rock.  They are also sometimes referred to as pictographs or cave paintings.  The most famous and commonly known petrographs come from the Upper Paleolithic Period (approximately 40 to 10 thousand years ago), particularly the Altamira Cave Paintings from Spain (see below).  These paintings were created with natural products, such as ocher, iron oxides, and manganese dioxide, which were ground into a powder and mixed with either grease, marrow, saliva, or blood.  The paint was then placed on the wall with fingers or rudimentary paint brushes.  Petrographs were not just consigned to ancient groups.  Many North American hunter-gatherer groups practiced petrographs.
 

Altamira Cave Painting

 
Petroglyphs are carvings etched into the surface of rocks.  The art of petroglyphs are associated with prehistoric groups with the earliest petroglyphs being associated with the Neolithic and Upper Paleolithic Periods (approximately 10 to 12 thousand years ago).  These petroglyphs have been found throughout the Old World (i.e. Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia), but the practice was not just associated to these areas.  The most recognizable petroglyphs are the Nasca Lines, which are ancient petro/geoplyphs found along the desert floor in southern Peru., but they are common throughout South America.

Monkey depicted in the Nasca Lines

And petroforms are made by placing rocks and boulders together into specific shapes and patterns.  The most common is the Inukshuks, which are common in the Artic.

Inukshuks of Canada.

The motivations behind creating these earthen works are not completely known, but scholars have put forward several different hypotheses:

• Some believe that they were merely art
• Some believe they were markers of trade routes or water sources
• Some believe they were the products of hallucinogenic episodes (yes, ancient groups got high)
• Some believe they were early education tools, enabling experienced individuals to teach less experienced individuals how to hunt, butcher animals, and more

Today, rock art formations continue, which leads to the inspiration of this post.  While in the desert of Utah, I found several modern renditions of rock art.  Here is a sampling of these works that I encountered:

Anthropology & Pop Culture

Bones. 

Indiana Jones. 

Ross Gellar. 

What do these three things have in common?  They are all pop culture references to anthropology and anthropological subject matter.  If you think about it, and I mean really think about it, you’ve probably been exposed to anthropological subject matter.  Popular television shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Bones have brought anthropology to the forefront of the public’s attention.  Even alternative media, such a Ph.D.Comics and Stargate SG-1, feature characters focusing on anthropology.  It is easy to point out modern references to anthropology but what about in the past?  Is the focus on anthropology a modern concept or one with a long, rich history?  Today’s blog post will focus on three not-so-modern examples of how anthropology influenced popular culture.

• Sylvia Plath “All the Dead Dears" 
• One of my favorite poets when I was younger was Sylvia Plath.  Plath is a world-renowned poet famous for her collection of poetry and infamous demise.  But one of her lesser known poems is called “All the Dead Dears” and describes the burial of a Roman woman housed at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  A reading of the poem alludes to the museum display, with the dead giveaway being the line in the poem that reads:

Relics of a mouse and a shrew
That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.

• Edvard Munch “The Scream”
• While many hypotheses regarding the inspiration for Edvar Munch’s famous painting “The Scream” exist, the one crafted by Robert Rosenblum has an anthropology connection.  In 1978, Rosenblum put forward that Munch may have been inspired by an exhibit of a Peruvian mummy at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, France.  The mummy and the painting share many startling similarities, including haunting “screaming” pose.

• James Joyce’s “Finnigan’s Wake”



THE CAT & THE RAT
The one, presumably chasing the other, became trapped in an organ pipe in the 1850s and were mummified. They are referred to in James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” where someone is described as being “…As stuck as that cat to that mouse in that tube of that Christchurch organ…”