Tombs of Pre-Inca Elite Discovered Under Peru Pyramid

Kelly Hearn in Buenos Aires, Argentina
for National Geographic News

November 27, 2006

A complex of tombs recently discovered under a pyramid in Peru offers landmark clues to a thousand-year-old pre-Incan culture, archaeologists report.

A team co-led by Izumi Shimada, an archaeologist with Southern Illinois University, found 22 artifact-laden tombs about 420 miles (675 kilometers) northwest of Lima, the capital (Peru map).

Among the findings are meticulously arranged human remains; gold, gilt copper, and bronze artifacts; and the first decorated tumi, or ceremonial knives, ever discovered by archaeologists at a burial site.

The graves belong to elite members of the Middle Sican culture, a gold-working people whose farming culture thrived in Peru's desert coastal region from around A.D. 900 to 1100.

Shimada and colleague Carlos Elera Arevalo, director of Peru's Sican National Museum, say the discovery is yielding crucial clues to this ancient civilization.

"What is most important about our fieldwork is we found an intact pre-Hispanic elite cemetery," Shimada said in an email interview.

The tombs formed a kind of religious complex that had managed to escape looters who commonly pillage burial sites throughout Peru.

Shimada said finding these rare objects undisturbed can help researchers "divine the context in which ceremonial items were used."

Ceremonial Knives

A key find involved 12 ceremonial tumi knives. Eight of the knives were plain, four were decorated, and two bore the likeness of the Sican Deity, believed by Sicans to rule the supernatural world.

Archaeologists have previously found undecorated tumi knives in residential and ceremonial settings. But until now they had never excavated ceremonial knives bearing "ideologically charged representations of the Sican Deity," Shimada said.

Until this discovery, Shimada added, the only decorated knives that archaeologists could study were those taken from tomb raiders.

"For decades the tumi knife bearing an image of the Sican Deity has been a national symbol of Peru," Shimada said.

"Yet thus far all known tumi knives with such a representation had been illegally looted, and little was known of their cultural contexts."

Shimada said some scholars believe the deity on the knives to be Naylamp, a figure who, according to an oral history recorded by Spaniards in the 16th century, became a god after emerging from the sea.

Peruvian Pyramid

Shimada said it is particularly important that the tomb complex was found beneath a pyramidal temple mound known as Huaca Loro.

"Many pre-Hispanic tombs were placed in existing mounds, but this is the first time that a major cemetery was found underlying a major mound," he said.

The artifacts and elements of the tombs' layout suggest that the Sican had a deep reverence for ancestors and that the people had apparently made repeated pilgrimages to the site.

"The fact that people had come at least 20 times over 500 years to leave offerings and burn the ground around the cemetery indicates the intimate and persistent relations between local populations and their ancestors," according to the project summary.

Shimada said the team found a "seated adult male personage wearing a copper-silver crown, decorated tumi knives, a gilt copper ceremonial cup, a large pectoral made of a gilt copper disk, and turquoise, shell, and other beads."

The man was found in a small square tomb 23 feet (7 meters) below the modern ground surface. He had been buried facing east toward a tomb believed to house one of the Sican's dynastic founders. "We also documented a number of large tombs of female elites that suggest that they played important social and religious roles in the Middle Sican culture," Shimada said.

One woman in her 20s was found sitting cross-legged in a 11.5-foot-square (3.5-meter-square) shaft tomb 33 feet (10 meters) below the surface.

Her body was surrounded by painted cloths and flanked by ceramic vessels, cast bronze artifacts, and a ceremonial cup of copper-silver alloy, he said.

"Overwhelmingly Important" Find

Joanne Pillsbury, director of pre-Columbian studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C., said the discovery was "very exciting" and that she expected it to generate "important new data on this complex pre-Inca culture.

"This excavation is a rare opportunity to examine the contents of an intricate burial," she said.

She added that Shimada will likely produce insights into ancient health and cultural affiliations by analyzing skeletal materials found at the site.

Walter Alva, a Peruvian anthropologist, has also praised the discovery, telling the Associated Press it was "overwhelmingly important."

Shimada has received funding in the past from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, including the excavation of a Middle Sican pottery workshop in 2001.

National Geographic News is a division of the National Geographic Society.

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