World’s Oldest Mummification Practices Revealed

Figure 1: Mummification process Mesolithic people may have used prior to burying their dead (Source: Peyroteo-Stjerna et al., 2022) 

 

For several decades now researchers who have worked in southern Peru and northern Chile have had the privilege to say that the world’s oldest mummification practices began among the Chinchorro people.  Now they will have to modify that claim to note that the world’s oldest known anthropogenic (artificially made) mummification practices come from this region of the world.  It appears that the world’s oldest mummification practices as related to intentional mortuary treatment may have actual began in Europe, and this blog post will detail how this conclusion was reached and its implications.

 

In the 1960s and several decades later excavations in the Sado Valley took place.  The Mesolithic sites of Arapouco and Poças de S. Bento provided a wealth of information concerning mortuary traditions from over 8,000 years ago.  Researchers have been fortunate to have access to the human remains and been able to study them to learn more about these individuals and their lives.  Unfortunately, though, the initial 1960s excavation notes and records had gone missing, leaving out some very important information that could have been gleaned from them about Mesolithic mortuary practices. 

 

All was not lost, however.  An accidental discovery of undeveloped rolls of film led to an extraordinary discovery.  They contained images of the original burials in situ, allowing scholars to study the burials as they were initially discovered in the 1960s.  What they discovered surprised them, to say the least.  They realized that there was evidence of potential mummification of the at least two of the individuals prior to burial.  They reached this conclusion based on several factors, largely revolving around the position of the bodies and bones.  The bodies were buried in very tight, flexed positions that demonstrated no movement of bones, particularly the hands and feet, that regularly and easily move due to their small size and light weight.  The movement of these bones is related to the decomposition process of the body, which cause the body’s soft tissues to expand, contract, and literally rot away, taking with them the small, lightweight bones and moving them away from their original location within the body.  There was also a lack of sediment between the long bones, which should have been present as a result of the soft tissues decomposing and leaving space that dirt would have filled in.

 

The scholars opted to test their hypotheses and traveled to a forensic research facility in Texas.  There they used donated bodies to replicate the Mesolithic burials, first allowing them to naturally mummify prior to burying them.  They also buried unmummified bodies to compare to the mummified ones to see if and what differences may exist.  Remarkable, the mummified burials were more similar to the Mesolithic burials than the unmummified burials, supporting their hypothesis.  They ultimately concluded that the Mesolithic people would have intentionally mummified their dead by wrapping them up and leaving them out in natural climatic conditions that spontaneous mummified the dead (Figure 1).  Upon successful mummification the bodies would have been moved to their final resting place at Arapouco and Poças de S. Bento.  While it unknown why Mesolithic individuals proceeded with mummifying their dead prior to burial there are a few ideas that the scholars put forward, including a situation of having to move bodies to a designated resting place.  If the deceased died too far from the burial site and needed to be moved then mummifying them would have made traveling with a dead body much easier.  This idea cannot be tested at this time, but it makes plausible sense when one considers the weight and decomposition stages of a body.  At the present time, however, it is unclear if this was the motivation for mummification or not.  What is clear, however, is that natural mummification of Portugal predates that which is already known in Peru, Chile, and Egypt, and this discovery also opens up new avenues of research regarding Mesolithic mortuary traditions.

 

References

Peyroteo-Stjerna, R., Nilsson Stutz, L., Mickleburgh, H., & Cardoso, J. (2022). Mummification in the Mesolithic: New Approaches to Old Photo Documentation Reveal Previously Unknown Mortuary Practices in the Sado Valley, Portugal. European Journal of Archaeology, 1-22. doi:10.1017/eaa.2022.3