In the Chilean desert, artfully preserved human remains are a symbol of local pride, but a changing climate threatens their existence.
In 1917, German archaeologist Max Uhle was surveying the sun-drenched coastline of the world’s driest desert when he stumbled upon a peculiar collection of human remains. Digging through the khaki-coloured earth, he discovered bodies deformed with sticks and reeds, their heads decorated with elaborate wigs and evocative masks of red and black clay.
“Many cadavers show post-mortal alterations, such as replacement of the head with a false one, disassembly of the head with appropriate repair, and straw arms or legs replacing the genuine ones,” Uhle wrote.
These early humans, discovered in Chile’s Atacama Desert near the city of Arica, would become known as the Chinchorro Mamas. The bodies of a dozen of the earliest hunter-gatherers (from populations that roamed the coasts of northern Chile and southern Peru between about 7,000 and 1,500 BC) would be excavated, recorded, and then largely forgotten for another 50 years.
The Azapa San Miguel Museum in Arica, Chile, researches and preserves Chinchorro mummies. The current facilities display only a small percentage of the ancient remains; a new archaeological museum is being built nearby.
These long-dead indigenous people are now in the spotlight. UNESCO placed the mummies and the Chinchorro settlement in present-day Chile on its World Heritage list in July 2021. A state-of-the-art museum is being built to preserve and display them in Arica, a small coastal capital known for its surfing scene. Climate change is a danger to the mummies’ survival, so this recognition and preservation (and the tourism both could bring) may have come just in time.
Why the oldest mothers in the world are in Chile
Cultures from Africa to Asia have mummified their dead for thousands of years. The Chinchorro, however, are the oldest artifact-created mummies ever found, made some 2,000 years before the ancient Egyptians wrapped pharaohs in shrouds. They have remained under the radar because they were not depicted in towering pyramids or linked to empire-building societies with large friendships. Instead, the Chinchorro wrapped all members of society (not just the elites) in reed shrouds before humbly (and superficially) depositing them in the arid earth.
“Most of the [places] we know of that are associated with World Heritage tend to be megasites like Machu Picchu,” says Bernardo Arriaza, an anthropologist at the University of Tarapacá who led the UNESCO proposal. “The milestones and the meetings have been less visible, and the sites themselves are less visible (they are not monumental), so they are underrepresented.”
The Camarones River runs through the Atacama Desert in Chile. It is in this arid region that the first Chinchorro mummies were bred in the early 20th century.
The Chinchorro began mummifying their dead about 7,000 years ago near Caleta Camarones. The tiny fishing village 62 miles south of Arica is a splash of green amid the monochrome Atacama landscape. Squeezed into a valley where the Camarones River flows into the Pacific Ocean, the town has a stunning crescent of golden sand, empanada restaurants and Chinchorro tombs.
Along a 20-mile-long stretch of road entering the Camarones Valley, travelers see the most dramatic representation of the culture in the area: six contemporary monumental Chinchorro statues, some as tall as 16 feet. They are meant to help people visualize the invisible mamas still found beneath the brown earth.
It was in this region that the Chinchorro developed their first mummification techniques around 5,050 BC. The Atacama residents essentially skinned the deceased, removing muscles and organs before reshaping the bodies with sticks, reeds and clay. Arriaza says this was intended to give the skeletons volume before artisans stitched them back together using human or sea lion skin.
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Left : A child’s mother lies on a reed mat.
Right : The Chinchorro people used clay masks and pieces of wood to remodel and decorate their mamas.
The anthropologist theorizes that natural arsenic in the Camarones River, a hundred times higher than modern safety levels, may have led to the accidental poisoning and preservation of unborn babies, triggering the Chinchorro’s ceremonial treatment of the deceased. Most of the first mothers are babies and fetuses. By turning rotting corpses into ornamental objects, they could become “masters of the dead,” he explains, projecting a sense of immortality onto the deceased and mourning with them long after their death.
Where to see the moms
For a closer look at the mummies, head to the San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum and the small Colón 10 interpretation center in Arica, at the northern edge of the Atacama Desert. This pleasant town attracts surfers with brown-sugar beaches, history buffs with war-themed Pacific battlefields and hikers to the volcano-studded parks above town.
Arica is also where the most advanced (and newest) Chinchorros were found, beginning in the 1980s. Most were built beneath the 455-foot-high Morro de Arica hill, an imposing chunk of rust-colored rock overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The mummies discovered here (48 of which can be seen in situ beneath a glass floor in Colón 10) were typically encased in ash paste and black manganese or red ochre, which helped preserve them.
A couple looks out over the Pacific Ocean from Arica’s Morro de Arica hill. Many Chinchorro mummies were discovered near the rock outcrop.
The world’s largest collection of Chinchorro mummies is nearby at the Azapa museum, open since 1967. The figures, some so small and stylized they look like gothic rag dolls, lie in white displays that resemble glass-topped coffins. They are not unlike Halloween scarecrows, torsos adorned with sticks and reeds and faces obscured by masks.
There are about 300 mummies in the Azapa collection, but 90 percent of them are kept out of sight in a storage facility with no air conditioning or humidity control. The new museum under construction, valued at 20 billion Chilean pesos (about US$24.7 million), is scheduled to open on an adjacent plot of land by 2024. It will be 5,000 square meters (53,820 square feet) in size and will store the mummies at optimal humidity levels of between 40 and 60 percent.
Why does climate change threaten mothers?
The dry climate of the Atacama has helped preserve the Chinchorro mummies for thousands of years, but some have deteriorated rapidly in the last decade, their skin melting into a black sludge. According to Harvard scientists, climate change is causing microorganisms to attack the mummies’ collagen.
Stronger El Niño currents are behind the increased humidity in the region, meaning mummies are at risk whether they are in a museum or in the desert. South of Caleta Camarones, residents often find fragments of Chinchorro fibers, bones and other remains in the peanut-colored hills. Jannina Campos, an archaeologist at the Chinchorro sites, says that “every time it rains, the desert blooms with bones. They used to say it only happens once every 100 years, but because of climate change, it is happening more frequently and with increasing force.”
Instead of removing the remains every time it rains, Campos simply records the mummies, notes their coordinates and buries them again in the hyper-arid soil. “The moment you take this cultural material out of the ground, it starts to deteriorate,” he says, adding that until the new museum is built, there is no space to store it anyway.
“A new museum with balanced environmental conditions will have a tremendous effect on preservation,” says Mariela Santos, head of conservation and museums at the University of Tarapacá. She hopes that this and UNESCO recognition will help turn the Arica and Parinacota regions in the far north of Chile into a new centre for cultural tourism.
Nicolas del Valle, coordinator of UNESCO’s culture programme for Chile, says that recent events are the beginning of a much broader process in Chile to give value to the Chinchorro. “There is still a lot of work to be done,” he explains, noting that in order to increase awareness of the Chinchorro culture around the world, the people who live on their ancestral land need to appreciate and share their history.
Residents living next to the sites in Arica still remember playing with the Chinchorro skulls they found in their backyards in the 1960s and 1970s. Now people have a sense of ownership. There are Chinchorro-themed restaurants and hotels. Creatives including artists (Paola Pimental), novelists (Patricio Barrios) and musicians (Grupo Raíces) are inspired by the mamas. Those who once unwittingly dug up graves are now the first to report that the graves are being dug up.
“Over time, people began to take the Chinchorro of science and to attach themselves to these first inhabitants of the Atacama Desert,” says Arriaza. “The community feels empowered; they feel that this is their own heritage and part of their identity.”