Experts Found An Underground Tomb And Walked Into A Very Grim Scene

The archaeologists had been working inside a subterranean chamber whose entrance snaked its way deep under the desolate Andean landscape. This is where that nerve comes in. After all, would you feel comfortable following a series of ancient steps leading straight into darkness? Not everyone would be cut out for that sort of endeavor.

This group was clearly up to the task, though. Down they went, gingerly descending the steps and entering an age-old chamber that time seemed to have forgotten. What must have been going through their minds? We can only imagine… The presumably fetid air. The smell. Lesser people surely would have bolted back up to the surface!

The tension didn’t exactly ease up the deeper these archaeologists forged into the ancient chamber. It quickly became clear that they weren’t alone down there. Something had called this space home for the past 1,000 or so years, and the team was about to come face-to-face with it.

These people were professionals, so they were presumably confident of not getting too fazed by anything they were likely to find on this excavation. But can you really prepare for a dig like this? Because what they ultimately encountered there, deep underground, was a frightful sight that will surely stay with them forever.

The Cajamarquilla site where all this happened is a fascinating place. It stands not terribly far away from the Peruvian capital of Lima, inside a wider district known as San Juan de Lurigancho. The settlement sprung up on the grounds of a preexisting encampment roughly 1,500 years ago, established by a people known as the Huari.

The Huari people — sometimes spelled Wari — represented one of the two primary cultures found in the central Andes between roughly 600 and 1000 A.D. The other was the Tiahuanaco — or Tiwanaku. Both cultures take their names from their respective capital cities, with Huari standing close to what we know today as the Peruvian city Ayacucho. Tiahuanaco, meanwhile, was in what now constitutes the northwest of Bolivia.

Huari and Tiahuanaco have been characterized as the first true empires of the Andes. We can say that because both cultures seemed to have actively spread throughout the region, with their influence felt far and wide. Really, they laid the groundwork for more famous empires that would come later, such as that of the Inca.

There are some clear similarities between the Huari and Tiahuanaco cultures, particularly in the style of art each produced. Huari works, though, were probably more abstract as a rule, whereas the Tiahuanaco were fond of depicting their ideas in a more literal way. The Huari in particular played a significant role in inspiring the art of the later Nazca culture.

Both the Huari and Tiahuanaco cultures were fond of a party, it seems, with members of both frequently participating in boozy feasts. A type of beer made from maize seems to have been a favorite, served in a special kind of goblet. This style of container was later taken up by the people of the Inca empire.

Of course, not all practices were equally shared between the Huari and Tiahuanaco cultures. The people of the former, for instance, were probably unrivaled when it came to their weaving skills. Maybe that’s why clothing came to take such an important place in Huari society, with certain items such as hats and tunics signifying the wearer’s place in the social order.

The Huari people communicated in their own unique tongue, which they forced onto those they conquered. And conquer they did, establishing settlements all over the area we now call Peru. They had a distinct architectural style, too, creating sturdy buildings specifically designed to withstand the earthquakes common in the region. The Inca would also take inspiration from these constructions.

The Huari economy functioned because of a highly refined bureaucracy, which was tasked with moving resources from more developed areas to the more outlying parts. A centralized state collected taxes and oversaw the general running of the economy, but the Huari had no real concept of a currency as we’d understand the term today.

The Huari were innovators in many respects, but especially when it came to their ability to work with metals. They were able to work with things such as gold, copper, and bronze in novel ways that hadn’t ever been seen before. Their techniques were definitely impressive for their time.

The specific ways the Huari used and manipulated metal were distinctly their own. In other words, it doesn’t seem like they borrowed their techniques from people from some other culture. So far as historians are able to tell, the Huari managed to devise their special metalworking techniques all by themselves.

The Huari culture was hugely important and influential, but it eventually fell into decline. It reached its height around the ninth century, before beginning to unravel for good. As per website Peru North, for reasons that aren’t fully understood, the society basically split into a bunch of rival factions by the year 1100.

One factor that seems to have driven the Huari’s collapse was a serious drought, which in turn apparently led to terrible unrest. According to bioarchaeologist Tiffiny Tung, the level of violence that prevailed around this dark time remains all too vividly clear even today. That is, we can see the evidence of this violence in their remains.

As published in the journal Science, Dr. Tung has analyzed the remains of Huari people, paying particular attention to their bones. In doing so, she’s been able to figure out the sorts of injuries these people experienced in their lifetimes. From that work, she has hypothesized that the decline of the culture led to an explosion in injuries and trauma caused by human-on-human violence.

If Dr. Tung’s theory is to be believed, the Huari culture came to a painful end. But that shouldn’t take away from its achievements, of which there were many. That’s clear to see in the archaeological evidence the Huari left behind, including old settlements such as Cajamarquilla, which at its height was home to some 15,000 individuals.

The ruins of Cajamarquilla indicate just how complicated and advanced this settlement once was. The area seems to have been intricately planned, arranged as it was into blocks containing residences, pyramids, and temples. The evidence suggests these buildings were later occupied by peoples who came later, such as the Ychma and the Inca.

Experts have acknowledged just how important the Cajamarquilla archaeological site really is, but as reported by the World Monuments Fund (WMF), it’s still been treated pretty badly in recent years. Rather than being protected, the area in its immediate vicinity has been used for residential development. There are valid reasons for this situation, but it’s still a shame the site hasn’t been protected from modern development.

Parts of the Cajamarquilla site have even been used as a dump for refuse. Other sections house animals, who graze upon it. All told, according to the WMF, around a quarter of the site has been pretty much ravaged and ruined. And as time goes on, more and more of the site is being lost.

That’s why the creepy discovery made by the archaeologists exploring the underground chamber there is so important. Whatever progress that can be made on the site must get done quickly, or else there’s a chance a lot of amazing secrets will never be unlocked. Thankfully, this particular excavation didn’t disappoint.

Works got under way in the middle of October 2021 with a group of about 40 individuals involved in the dig. That’s a pretty big team, so obviously someone needed to run the show and make sure things went smoothly. That job was left to archaeologists Yomira Huamán Santillán and Pieter Van Dalen Luna.

Under the guidance of its two leaders, the team got to work exploring the claustrophobic darkness of an underground chamber. And what greeted them inside there was quite terrifying. It was a fellow human being, laid to rest. But looking at the disturbing way this body had been placed there, it was clear this had been no ordinary burial.

The body had been mummified, with binding wrapped tightly around its surface. But if that wasn’t creepy enough, it gets worse. This long-lost person wasn’t just laying in their tomb serenely. No, it seemed to be recoiled into the unnatural pose of the fetal position — and it was tied up.

Imagine being one of those archaeologists, encountering such a horrific scene. You’d be forced to question what on Earth had happened here. Why had the mummy been left this way? Was it a punishment of some sort? Well, on the contrary, it seems this disturbing pose was probably chosen by the people laying the body to rest for religious reasons.

Given the mummy’s advanced age — it’s thought to be at least 800 years old, and maybe as much as 1,200 years old — we can say this person had lived long before colonization of the Americas had taken place. In fact, this person was around well before the Inca civilization thrived. That makes it an incredibly important discovery, as we still have plenty of questions about what was going on in pre-Hispanic South America around that time.

In November 2021 about a month after the excavation had begun, Van Dalen Luna spoke with CNN to tell the world what he and his colleagues knew about the mummy. First off, he explained, it seems the person had been male. The team thinks he was aged 25 to 30 when he passed away.

This young guy wasn’t laid to rest inside his tomb alone. No, the archaeologists also uncovered some other things in the chamber — and they were quite unexpected. There were, for instance, the remains of a number of salt-water molluscs in there. That’s a little weird anyway, but doubly so when you consider the ocean is roughly 15 miles away from the Cajamarquilla site.

Speaking to CNN, Van Dalen Luna explained what might have been going on in relation to the sea molluscs. He said, “After the body is placed in the tomb, there are constant events and activities. That is to say, their descendants keep coming back over many years and placing food and offerings there, including molluscs.”

In addition to the sea molluscs and the mummy itself, there were also some bones belonging to various animals inside the tomb. Some of these had come from a llama, which was likely a common source of nutrition back in the mummified man’s time. There were also guinea pig and dog remains inside the chamber, as well as the remnants of some vegetables.

Taken together, the various elements of this burial might seem odd to most of us. But to the experts, the implications were quite clear. It seems likely this mummified man had been a person of some note in his lifetime. As Van Dalen Luna remarked to CNN, “The fact of finding a mummy with these characteristics in the middle of the plaza makes it clear that this is someone of high status.”

If we cast our minds back to Dr. Tung’s study into the collapse of Huari society, we can maybe conclude this mummy was laid to rest while the civilization had still been thriving. According to the researcher, the Huari took care to lay their dead to rest while the society was in good shape. But that wasn’t still necessarily true as it went into decline.

Once the Huari civilization was deteriorating, burials were often careless — if not actively callous. Dr. Tung explained to Science in 2016 that human remains dating to after the height of Huari society have been uncovered. They seem to have been just left in an unceremonious pile, with evidence that some of them had even been desecrated.

Given the level of care that seems to have been put into Van Dalen Luna’s mummy’s burial, then, we can probably say the man had been alive at a high point in Huari history. But that’s unlikely to be the only insight to be gleaned from this specimen. It was, after all, found in great condition, so experts can really gain some insight from it.

One such expert is bioarchaeologist Dagmara Socha, who spoke to website Business Insider about the discovery. She said, “The problem in many sites in southern America is that they’re extensively robbed by the grave robbers, so you need to be very lucky to find a mummy intact like this. We can make a lot of investigation of such a body, including the investigation of ancient DNA.”

Beyond this discovery being a great thing for historians and archaeologists, the general public stands to gain something, too. Not long after its excavation, the mummy was exhibited at Lima’s San Marcos University. What better way to get people interested in history than showing them something like this first-hand?

Van Dalen Luna delivered a public statement on the day the mummy was put on display. He said, “Today at the National Major University of San Marcos, in Lima, we presented archaeological discoveries from research done in Cajamarquilla in 2021. The most important is the mummy, a piece of news that has traveled around the world, that is currently being analyzed.”

Who knows what further secrets experts might yet deduce from this discovery? The mummy could potentially reveal so much about the lost Huari civilization — and we have the nerveless archaeologists who ventured into one of its creepy chambers to thank. Let’s hope they continue to reveal more from the Cajamarquilla site before it’s too late.