TORONTO, CANADA—Live Science reports that seven tombs containing at least 171 mummies have been excavated at Tenahaha, located in Peru’s Cotahuasi Valley. Dozens of tombs filled with as many as 40 mummies each are tucked into the small hills that surround the 1,200-year-old ceremonial site. “The dead, likely numbering in the low thousands, towered over the living,” archaeologist Justin Jennings wrote in a chapter of the new book, Tenahaha and the Wari State. Soon after death, the knees of the bodies had been pulled up to shoulder level, and the arms folded along the chest. The remains were then bound with rope and wrapped in layers of textiles, and the bodies of the youngest were placed in jars. Some of the mummies were later intentionally broken up and scattered among the tombs. “In the Andes, death is a process, it’s not as if you bury someone and you’re done,” Jennings said. He thinks that Tenahaha may have been “neutral ground,” where people met, feasted, and buried their dead. “It’s a period of great change and one of the ways which humans around the world deal with that is through violence. What we are suggesting is that Tenahaha was placed in part to deal with those changes, to find a way outside of violence, to deal with periods of radical cultural change,” he explained. Jennings is a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, and is a member of the international team of scientists that conducted the investigations. To read about another ancient Andean culture, see "A Wari Matriarchy?"
