LIMA, PERU—According to a Reuters report, the remains of 16 indentured Chinese laborers have been unearthed at the top of the Bellavista huaca, or adobe pyramid, in Lima. Indentured workers were brought to Peru after 1854, when slavery was abolished. The people buried at the top of the adobe pyramid, which was built by the Ichma people some 1,000 years ago, are thought to have picked cotton on a nearby plantation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The site may have been chosen for the graves because Chinese laborers were usually excluded from Lima’s Catholic cemeteries. The bodies in the earliest burials had been wrapped in shrouds, while the bodies in the later burials had been placed in coffins and dressed in blue-green jackets. Archaeologist Roxana Gomez added that an opium pipe and a small ceramic vessel were found in one of the coffins. For more, go to “Letter From Peru: Connecting Two Realms.”
