Mummies were first discovered in the Atacama at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the Chinchorro attracted sustained attention only in 1983, when ninety-six superbly preserved cadavers were discovered beneath a massif that rises above downtown Arica, Chile. About 90 percent of their diet was seafood—fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and seaweed—the Chinchorro ate almost no fruit, vegetables, or land animals. Sometime before 5000 B.C. they began mummifying bodies—children at first, adults later on. Nobody knows why. They peeled off the skin from the limbs like so many socks, covered
...more
