BELIEFS

The Chinchorro, the Oldest Mummies

~7,000 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Northgrippian

The Chinchorro were fisher-hunter-gatherers of the Atacama Desert coast, in northern Chile and southern Peru, who treated part of their dead by taking the body apart and rebuilding it. The corpse was eviscerated, worked inside and out, refilled with plant and mineral matter, modelled back into human shape with clay, and the skin was laid over the reconstruction. Bernardo Arriaza dates this system, which he holds to be the oldest artificial mummification in the world, from about 5050 BCE to about 1720 BCE, and sorts the bodies into successive styles: black, red, bandaged, mud-coated. A survey of 162 treated bodies traces a drift within that span, from internal stuffing, which gave the body volume without being seen, towards external treatment, which was made to be seen. The people who did this grew no crops and made no pottery; their economy rested on the sea.

Why it matters

Mortuary effort on this scale is usually looked for in farming societies with a surplus to spend. Arriaza reads the Chinchorro record the other way: the density of cemeteries, the labour sunk into each body and the villages along the shore mark a settled maritime society whose ideological complexity had been underrated. Marquet and colleagues offer a circumstance rather than a creed. Fresh water and marine productivity rose, the population grew, and in a desert where a corpse barely decomposes the dead accumulated in plain sight, the condition their model gives for the living handling them.

Dating & uncertainty

The start is reported differently according to the series used. Rivera and Rothhammer give uncorrected radiocarbon dates for the Chinchorro running from 7,810 to 2,480 years before present. Arriaza places the beginning of the artificial system near 5050 BCE, close to 7,000 years ago, and its abandonment near 1720 BCE, while the survey of treated bodies works across 7,000 to 3,250 years ago. The bracket kept here runs from 7,100 to 6,500 years ago. Should the oldest determinations hold, the treatment begins seven centuries earlier, and Arriaza's four styles have to be spread over a longer span.

Sources

1. Marquet et al. (2012), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · Emergence of social complexity among coastal hunter-gatherers in the Atacama Desert of northern Chiledoi:10.1073/pnas.1116724109
2. Arriaza (1995), Latin American Antiquity · Chinchorro Bioarchaeology: Chronology and Mummy Seriationdoi:10.2307/971599
3. Montt et al. (2021), Antiquity · Relational bodies: affordances, substances and embodiment in Chinchorro funerary practicesdoi:10.15184/aqy.2021.126
4. Rivera et al. (1991), International Journal of Anthropology · The chinchorro people of Northern Chile 5000 BC-500 BC, a review of their culture and relationshipsdoi:10.1007/bf02444952

Our species’ history as one day

23:28:0032 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day