Oldest natural Chinchorro mummy at fishing camp in the Atacama desert (9000 years ago)
(originally posted 7/23/2020)
The site from 10,000 years ago I learned about today was the Acha-2 Camp in Chile. It was here that the oldest mummy of a culture that regularly mummified their dead before it was done in ancient egypt was found. It was a simple seasonal fishing camp off a river in the Atacama desert that was set up 9000 years ago near the modern day city of Arica. It was part of the Chinchorro culture, which had already been around for 4000 years by this point. Fishing instruments like fish hooks made of cactus and bone sinkers were found nearby. The were able to tell from the composition of the mummy that his diet was 80% marine animals, including fish and mammals. When you’re in a desert by a river, there isn’t much else to eat than fish. They didn’t practice agriculture, even though at the time other cultures in Peru and Bolivia were doing so. But they could eat some plants and animals that existed along a very narrow band around the river. Unfortunately, eating too much seafood can cause audio exostosis (a bony growth in the ear), and this guy suffered from it. The river flowed from the Andes mountains only during the summer, so it’d make sense that the camp was only temporary or seasonal, as suggested by some round tent posts found at the site.
This mummy, called Acha Man, was once thought to have been the oldest mummy in the world, but older ones in North America have been found. It’s safe to call it the oldest known mummy in South America though. The body was mummified naturally though. The Atacama Desert is the dryest region on Earth, and bodies just do not compose there easily. The skull of the mummy was found to be wrapped in a totoro reeds (which were also used in building homes and baskets) and given a proper buriel with grave goods. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any pictures of the mummy. I saw an internet comment that someone had absconded with the body and that the mummy was lost, so if this comment can be trusted sadly they won’t get any dna from the mummy to be able to tell about where he came from and if he had any descendants.
The Chinchorro culture was based in the Atacama desert and lived pretty much the way Acha Man did for thousands of more years, primarily fishing along seasonal rivers and getting other sea foods by the coast. They started intentionally preparing mummies about 7000 years ago (taking out some internal organs and other preservation measures), about 1000 years before Egypt started doing the same thing. The practice apparently started because young children started dying by arsenic poisoning and the mothers wanted to remember them better, but later they started doing it to everyone. They weren’t a stratified culture like Egypt, so pretty much everyone was mummified, not just the elite, and they weren’t given elaborate tombs. Mummies can be found all over the place today such that there isn’t even enough room in the museums to hold them, so they keep the mummies where they find them now.
The Chinchorro culture transitioned to a new way of life after immigrants from the Andes Mountains came down to the desert 4 thousand years ago and introduced agriculture, and they then stopped mummifying their dead. The culture is considered to have ended 500 years later at about 1500BC. King Tut would later become Pharoah of Egypt and the most famous Mummy over 150 years later in 1325 BC and I would one day get to see his mummy on exhibition at the Science Museum of Minnesota.
Sources:
News Stories-
Sedentism (describes Acha-2 Site) (1994)
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2309&context=rtds (see page 12)
7ka Life (1998)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1998-05-13-9805130037-story,amp.html
Twined shrouds (2008)
Egyptian Mummies (2014)
3 south american mummy cultures (Feb 2015)
https://www.theposthole.org/read/article/332
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