Archaeologists discover passageways in 3,000-year-old Peruvian temple

Archaeologists have excavated a network of passageways under a 3,000-year-old temple in the Peruvian Andes. Chavin de Huantar temple was once a religious and administrative hub for people across the region, Reuters reported.

Found earlier this month, the passageways have features believed to have been built earlier than the temple’s labyrinthine galleries, according to an archaeologist at Stanford University.

John Rick, who was involved in the discovery, said: “It’s a passageway, but it’s very different. It’s a different form of construction. It has features from earlier periods that we’ve never seen in passageways.”

At least 35 underground passageways, which sit 3,200m above sea level, have been found over several years, connecting with each other.

They were built between 1,200 and 200 years BC in the foothills of the Andes.

Chavin de Huantar, declared a World Heritage Site in 1985, was the inspiration and name of the operation carried out when the Peruvian armed forces built a network of tunnels to rescue 72 people taken hostage by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) rebel group at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima in 1997.

It comes as archaeologists uncovered an “unprecedented” network of lost cities in the Amazon that shed light on how ancient civilisations constructed vast urban landscapes while living alongside nature.

Researchers used lidar technology, dubbed “lasers in the sky”, to scan through the tropical forest canopy, and examine sites found in the savannah forest of southwest Amazonia.

They uncovered a wide range of intricate settlements that have laid hidden under thick tree canopies for centuries in the Llanos de Mojos savannah forest in Bolivia.

The findings, described in the journal Nature on Wednesday, shed light on cities built by the Casarabe communities between AD500 and AD1400.

Heiko Prumers, an archaeologist and study co-author from the German Archaeological Institute, said the complexity of the settlements was “mind-blowing”.

The site features an unprecedented array of elaborate and intricate structures “unlike any previously discovered” in the region, including 5m high terraces covering 22 hectares – the equivalent of 30 football pitches – and 21m tall conical pyramids, say the scientists, including Jose Iriarte from the University of Exeter in the UK.

Researchers examined six areas within a 4,500 sq km region of the Llanos de Mojos, in the Bolivian Amazon, that belonged to the Casarabe culture.

They also found a vast network of reservoirs, causeways, and checkpoints, spanning several kilometres at the site.

DNA Tests Reveal That Paracas Skulls Are Not Human -Archaeology and Ancient Civilization

Situated completely within the province of Isco, Paracas is a desert peninsula in the Ica Region, on the southern coast of Peru. It is this place that witnessed the most mysterious findings by the Peruvian archaeologist Julio C.

Tello, the “father of Peruvian archaeology”, in 1928. He came into contact with a complex and sophisticated burial site under the harsh surface of the Paraca desert while unearthing.

Upon entering the cemetery, the Peruvian archaeologist found a number of controversial skeletal remains that would alter our perception of our predecessors forever. Inside the tombs are, perhaps, the 300 largest elongated skulls ever found on Earth, named Paracas skulls, dating back 3,000 years ago.

In the event that the shape of the skulls might not have been mysterious enough, archaeologists recently conducted DNA examination on some selected skull samples, producing some enigmatic and incredible results challenging every knowledge we have been taught  about our origin and the predecessors.

Deformation of the skull: An ancient religious practice

The skull deformation techniques performed on the mentioned Paracas skulls were different from those around the world, leading to the produced items differ as well.

Some notable tribes in the South America have carried out the method of binding baby skulls to transform their shape, creating drastically elongated heads.

Putting enough pressure gradually over a long time with the help of ancient tools, these indigenous people succeeded in carrying out cranial deformations found in ancient African societies as well.

An interesting feature of this technique is that it only altered the shape of the skulls while still maintaining the same cranial size, weight and volume, compared to regular human skulls.

Well, this is where Paracas skulls strike. They are at least 25% bigger and up to 60% heavier than ordinary skulls, which is believed to be unable to achieve with those techniques.

Furthermore, the structures of the skulls are completely different from normal ones, only having one parietal palate compared to two in regular skulls.

These strange features remain mysterious for a couple of decades as experts are still unable to discover who possessed such strangely-formed skulls.

Later tests made the Paracas skulls more enigmatic

5 samples of the Paracas skulls, including hair, teet, skin and bone fragments, were sent for genetic examination by the director of the Paracas Museum of History, giving astonishing results.

The details produced by the analysis were incredible, further fueling the mysteries surround the skulls. Even the lab that conducted the analysis wasn’t informed in advance of the skull origins to steer clear of ‘affecting the results.’

Mitochondrial DNA, maternally passed down from mother to offspring, surprisingly showed mutations that were mysteriously undetermined to any man, primate or animal ever known.

The samples contained mutations suggesting that experts were working on the skulls of an entirely new ‘human’, completely contradicting with Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

In the past, similar outcome has been produced from the analysis on Star Child Skull found around 1930 in a mine tunnel, about 100 miles southwest of Chihuahua City, Mexico.

The people whom the Paracas skulls belong to were depicted to be too different in terms of biology for ordinary people are unable to interbreed with. “I’m not sure this fits into the known evolutionary tree,” wrote the geneticist.

Who were these mysterious beings? Did they evolve separately on earth? What caused them to have such drastic differences from ordinary human beings?

And is it possible that these beings did not come from the earth? All of these possibilities are theories that cannot be nullified given current evidence.

All we know so far is that there are many things that are beyond the understanding of researchers, historians and scientists. It is possible that after all, the question of whether we are alone in the universe can be answered thanks to the Paracas skulls.

What Prompted the Mass Sacrifice of Hundreds of Children and Llamas in Ancient Peru?

Archaeologists think the ritual, which felled 137 children and 200 llamas, might have been motivated by recent natural disaster.

The Peruvian archaeologist had been midway through a dig on the outskirts of his hometown of Huanchaco when a local business owner contacted him with alarming news: His two children had trudged home from a long day of play carrying a cache of what looked like human bones.

Prieto dropped everything. Shortly after seeking permission from Peru’s Ministry of Culture to conduct an emergency excavation, he and his team began to dig. “From the very beginning, I realized this was something big,” Prieto says.

He was right to follow his hunch. Within hours of breaking ground, the researchers had uncovered the skeletal remains of dozens of bodies dating back some 550 years—evidence of what would become known as one of the largest mass child sacrifices unearthed in history.

Eight years later, Prieto and his colleagues chronicle their years-long excavation in a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE. According to the researchers, around 140 children and 200 young llamas were among those sacrificed around 1450 CE, near the capital of what was then Peru’s Chimú Empire. Though the motivations behind the ritual remain mysterious, it’s possible the massacre occurred in response to a destructive bout of heavy rainfall and coastal flooding.

“This is unprecedented,” says Sara Juengst, a bioarchaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who was not involved in the study. “I’ve been working in South America for 10 years, and I have never heard of anything like this before.”

The sacrificial site, known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas, dates back to the later years of the Chimú Empire, Peru’s most prominent pre-Incan civilization. Today, Las Llamas is located on the outskirts of the city of Trujillo, home to nearly 2 million people. In recent years, Trujillo’s rapid urban expansion has encroached on several archaeological sites, inadvertently revealing occasionally gruesome artifacts.

Such was the case with Las Llamas when, in 2022, the now infamous collection of human and animal bones began to erode out of a roadside dune. It didn’t take long for the site and its artifacts to draw the attention of an international group of researchers, including John Verano, a biological anthropologist at Tulane University. “I’ve worked in this area for 33 years, but we really had no idea that anything at this scale had ever happened,” Verano says. “Globally, there is nothing comparable. It’s a pretty dramatic and unexpected discovery.”

The brutal final tally yielded the remains of at least 137 children, 3 adults, and 200 young llamas. Early on in the excavation, consistent motifs among the dead indicated that the researchers had stumbled upon a sacrificial event, rather than a typical burial ground.

Among the children, boys and girls alike were selected for the ritual, and appeared to encompass several different ethnic groups within the Chimú Empire which, at its peak, held dominion over a 600-mile-long territory from just south of Ecuador down to central Peru. All the children appeared healthy at time of death, with most in the range of eight to 12 years old, though several might have been as young as five or as old as 14.

These stunning numbers highlight a purposeful cultivation of youth for a clear sacrificial event, says Tiffiny Tung, a bioarchaeologist at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the study. “This was not a weird demographic blip,” she says. “There was a very clear, conscious decision that this ritual had to be enacted through the bodies of children.”

Among the Chimú, children were likely considered transitional beings, hovering between human and godlike, celestial and earthly. On the cusp of adulthood, their bodies were more androgynous, their societal roles not yet crystallized. Lost to sacrifice, those futures would never come to be, Prieto says. This could have been the Chimú peoples’ way of offering up the most precious thing they could conceive of.

In light of this, the llamas might seem an afterthought. But as a source of food, transportation, and fiber for textiles, these animals represented a valuable commodity in pre-Hispanic Peru. Such a culling would have amounted to significant economic loss for the ancient Chimú, Verano says.

Bolstering the case for sacrifice, close examination of the remains revealed that the children and llamas were probably killed by expert hands. Many of the bodies showed the same patterns of damage to the breast bones and ribs, hinting that their chests had been sliced open and pulled apart so their hearts could be removed, perhaps for a separate rite.

No written records from Chimú society survive, so the significance of the heart, like much else, remains an open question. But Verano has theories. “The heart beats—it’s the thing we can feel in our chests,” he says. “That’s a very dramatic thing, and many ancient societies considered it an important organ. It may have been something seen as related to life and strength.”

The victims’ bodies were then placed in what seem to be purposeful arrays, with most of the children interred facing the sea to the northwest and the llamas looking to the Andes in the east. Whatever symbolism underlies this sacrificial choreography isn’t entirely clear, but the consistency of the arrangement indicates it had some significance.

“This is a phenomenal contribution to our understanding of ritual practices in the Andes,” Tung says. “These were not isolated one-offs. This was a very premeditated, sanctified, ritually codified practice.”

The three adults—two women and a man—pose more of a puzzle, however. While their chests weren’t opened, all three were buried close to the children and llamas, and appear to have been part of the ritual. Prieto thinks that the women might have been caretakers for the children during the extended congregation that likely preceded such a large, coordinated ritual. The man, on the other hand, might have been the executioner himself.

lso unveiled during the excavation was a series of footprints preserved in a layer of dried mud. The imprints paint a grim portrait of barefooted children, sandaled adults, and leashed llamas, all hailing from different locales, but converging on a single sacrificial site—a macabre, unifying march to the death.

In this soil might also lie some of the only clues about the motivations behind this grisly assembly. Under normal conditions, the landscape of Las Llamas featured a series of sandy dunes. But at the time of the sacrifice, the area had recently been blanketed by a thick, impressionable layer of heavy mud, clay, and gravel, possibly due to a recent climate event related to El Niño.

Uncharacteristically warm ocean waters might have taken their toll on marine food sources, while the torrential downpour and flooding could have ravaged the Chimú peoples’ extensive infrastructure of agricultural canals. In light of such devastation, the sacrifice might have been a desperate attempt to quell the onslaught.

It’s hard to know for sure if natural disaster was truly enough to prompt such a strong reaction, Verano says, but it wouldn’t be the first time two such events were linked. For leaders who ruled under the guise of near-omnipotence, inclement weather could give the impression that they’d lost their edge, he explains.

Others, however, have noted that the sacrifice occurred somewhat close to the cataclysmic conquest of the Chimú by the Inca around 1470 CE. Verano has “a hard time making a logical sense out of killing your children to stop a military conquest,” but it’s still possible the urgency of both situations built off each other.

Either way, the sacrifice might have served several purposes—an effort to appease the gods, perhaps, or a timely display of power. “This tells us about the authority of the Chimú state,” Tung says. “A ritual like this sends a strong message. It’s a way to subjugate and create social control [amongst your own people] without even touching the flesh of others.”

Going forward, this excavation might not be unique: The researchers are already hard at work at another site nearby, where the numbers are so far looking similarly staggering. But the final chapter on Las Llamas itself has yet to be written. The researchers are still conducting additional testing on these remains, including more in-depth DNA analysis that might help determine if any of the victims were related to each other.

In the meantime, the researchers stress that they don’t want these findings to be taken the wrong way. Dark though this display was, there was probably an element of honor in participating in the sacrifice, Juengst says. “It may be something that’s hard for us to conceive of, but the belief may have been that this would help society in some way,” she says. “It wasn’t necessarily malevolent or violent. And unless we’re within that cultural context, it’s hard to judge.”

And while child sacrifice is a taboo topic in the modern world, it’s important not to deny the reality of a culture’s past, says Vera Tiesler, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States who was not involved in the study. “We shouldn’t deny these societies their real history,” she says. “We need to comprehend it in an objective way—interpret the evidence, understand it, and go as deeply as we can.”

Ancient Untouched Royal Tomb Found in Peru – ROBERT SEPEHR

An ancient royal tomb, older than the Inca civilization, and filled with treasures and mummified women dating back over 1,200 years, has been found in Peru. This is the first such tomb belonging to South America’s Wari civilization found untouched by vandals, the National Geographic said.

Long before the Inca built Machu Picchu, the Wari empire flourished throughout much of present-day Peru. At a time when Paris had just 25,000 residents, the Wari capital Huari was home to 40,000 people at its height, according to National Geographic, which reported the find.

Though the surrounding site has been looted many times, this mausoleum has managed to evade grave robbers for hundreds of years, archaeologists say.

The fact that most of the skeletons were of women and the very rich grave goods, leads archeologists to the interpretation that this was a tomb of the royal elite.

Protected from looters by 30 tons of stone, those interred in the mausoleum lay exactly where Wari attendants left them long ago. It is very likely that the children’s bodies found inside were placed there as an offering, and to accompany the prominent person.

“The adult was likely a master weaver”, said Isabel Flores, an archaeologist at Pucllana. “The infant”, she added, “was probably killed and buried in the tomb as an offering in the adult’s honor. When we unwrap the bodies, we will be able to determine the adult’s age, position in society and gender,” said Ms Flores.

The Wari civilisation was active in an area that now contains Lima from approximately 600 to 1,000 AD, some 500 years before the Inca empire emerged.

Seventy Wari tombs have been unearthed at the Pucllana site, which is nestled in a residential neighbourhood in central Lima. The funerary bundles are large textile wrapped individuals.

The bundles themselves appear like individuals, with a large circular body and a false head made of textile or wood.

Ms Flores and Gladys Paz, the head archaeologist of the team that made the discovery, both said that this most recent find is among the site’s richest treasures yet.

“This is the most important find in decades of excavation, because the mummies are intact,” said Ms Paz.

Piercing blue eyes undimmed by the passing of 1,300 years, this is the Lady of the Mask – a mummy whose discovery could reveal the secrets of a lost culture. She was found by archaeologists excavating a pyramid in Peru’s capital city.

It is the first time a tomb from the region’s Wari culture has been discovered intact and gives historians the chance to pin down exactly how the pre-Incas buried their dead.

The mummy – assumed to be a noblewoman because of the ornate mask – was found in a crouching position surrounded by ceramics and textiles associated with female weavers.

“Her face startled me at first,” said 19-year-old Miguel Angel, one of the workers who carried her body out of the tomb. “I wasn’t expecting to find anything like that.” Earlier the workers at the site removed other adult mummies found lying near the lady of the mask.

These ‘Alien’ Mummies Appear to Be a Mix of Looted Body Parts

This week, reports and bizarre images of a group of five mummy-like bodies from Peru that have three-fingered hands led to claims by some that the mummies are not human … and may be aliens. 

Clearly, they aren’t aliens. But even so, what gives? Are they even real mummies?

Archaeologist has found that some of these mummies may represent a combination of the looting and manipulation of real human mummy parts.

One of the mummies “looks like a typical Nazca mummy, in the flexed, seated position,” said Andrew Nelson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Canada. (The Nazca people were an ancient culture in Peru who bundled up their mummies in textiles and constructed the sprawling geoglyphs called the Nazca lines.)

Grotesquely, the hands and feet seen on this mummy, and possibly the others, may also be parts of real human mummies that have been manipulated by forgers, the white coating added afterward to hide the manipulations, said Nelson, who is not involved with research on the mummies.

A number of other researchers also believe that real human mummy parts were used to create these fakes. A dozen Peruvian mummy researchers have put out a statement condemning the practice saying that it “has violated numerous national and international norms.”

One of the researchers who signed the statement told Archaeologist that “I particularly find repulsive that anyone would [dare] to dehumanize deceased human bodies. You can’t take away the condition of human to a human being!” said Guido Lombardi a professor of forensic sciences at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia.

According to Jose Jaime Maussan Flota, who is a journalist working with researchers studying these mummies, members of the team pay Mario an undisclosed sum to view the mummies, take samples of them and conduct X-rays and CT scans on them.

Looted in Nazca

The mummies were supposedly discovered in 2015 by tomb robbers working in the Nazca region, an area where the ancient Nazca culture flourished.

The mummies come from “a group of ‘huaqueros,’ or archaeological treasure hunters, from the city of Palpa,” said Thierry Jamin, president of the Inkari-Cusco institute. Jamin is involved with research on the mummies and refers to the head of this looting group as Mario.

“Mario is a treasure hunter. He is a delinquent, who is well known to the police services of the Nazca region. It has looted archaeological sites on the Peruvian coast for more than 20 years. And justice does not do much to stop him,” Jamin said, claiming that he informed Peru’s Ministry of Culture about Mario’s activities, but has not heard back from the ministry. Officials from the Ministry of Culture did not return requests for comment from Archaeologist. 

Mysterious researcher

Videos showing investigations of the mummies have appeared on the sites gaia.com and the-alien-project.com. The lead researcher for the group studying the mummies, a man named Konstantin Korotkov, gave an interview recently in Russian for the Russian Mir 24 TV station. T

He news site RT (formerly Russia Today) claims that Korotkov said that the mummies have 23 pairs of chromosomes (like a human), but their anatomy looks non-human.

“They [the mummies] could be extraterrestrials or bio robots,” RT quotes Korotkov as saying. In a video on gaia.com, Korotkov claims that radiocarbon-dating results show that one of the mummies (the same one that Nelson says looks like it was made with parts from a Nazca mummy) dates back around 1,700 years, a time when the Nazca culture was flourishing.

Korotkov did not reply to requests for comment and the university gaia.com claims he is affiliated with (St. Petersburg University in Russia) shows no record of him online. Officials at the university did not reply to requests for comment.

Another affiliation given in the media for Korotkov — the National Research University in St. Petersburg — doesn’t seem to exist.

The National Research University Higher School of Economics has a campus in St. Petersburg — but again no mention of Korotkov on that university’s website and officials with the university did not return requests for comment. Korotkov’s personal website sells a product called Bio-Well that he claims can detect “human light.

” He makes no mention on his website of being a professor at St. Petersburg University in Russia or a National Research University in St. Petersburg.

Mummy looting

While the three-fingered mummies clearly seem to be fakes of some kind, scientists have discovered numerous mummified remains in Peru, including 171 mummies from tombs excavated near the site of Tenahaha, which date back around 1,200 years.

While some mummies in Peru have been discovered by scientists, others, such as the ones that may have been used to create these “aliens,” are stolen by looters, who are known to ransack ancient Peruvian tombs before archaeologists are able to scientifically excavate them. The United States has restricted the import of artifacts from Peru in an attempt to stem the tide of looting.

While Mario and his gang may still be pillaging tombs, the situation has been improving, said Ann Peters, a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

“The protection of archaeological sites has greatly improved in the last decade with the establishment of legal requirements for environmental and heritage impact studies, the establishment of the Ministry of Culture and the employment of more professional archaeologists,” Peters said. “However, some looters and traffickers in antiquities still exist in Peru, as well as in the United States and other countries.”

Archaeologists find 800-year-old mummy in Peru

A preserved rope-bound mummy, estimated to be at least 800 years old, has been discovered in an underground tomb by archaeologists on Peru’s central coast. The mummified remains, which are in excellent condition, were found at the Cajamarquilla archaeological site about 15 miles (24 kilometers) inland from Lima.

The rope-bound mummy was from the culture that developed between the coast and mountains of Peru, according to archaeologist Pieter Van Dalen Luna from the State University of San Marcos, as reported in the Guardian. The mummy is likely from the Chaclla culture, which developed in the high Andes around Lima between 1200 and 800 years ago.

“The main characteristic of the mummy is that the whole body was tied up by ropes and with the hands covering the face, which would be part of the local funeral pattern…. Radiocarbon dating will give a more precise chronology,” said archaeologist Pieter Van Dalen Luna, from the State University of San Marcos, Peru ( UNMSM) to Reuters. He added that the remains are believed to be of a person who lived in the high Andean region of the country, according to the Independent.

The Rope-bound Mummy And The Mummies of Peru

Mummification was practiced by several indigenous cultures of the Andes region beginning as far back as 7000 years ago.

The Chinchorro people, who lived in what is now Peru and Chile, were the world’s first practitioners of mummification, thousands of years before the Egyptians. Preserving the bodies of their loved ones allowed the living to retain a link with the dead.

What is fascinating is that Peruvian mummies were not just interred and left to get on with their afterlife. Some people kept mummies in their homes or brought them to festivals and they were often involved in ceremonies such as marriages, sowing, and harvesting.

In some cultures, the people brought offerings of food or drink to their loved ones’ graves. Considered a link between the living and the gods, these mummies could also be taken from their resting place and “consulted” on important occasions.

Many different cultures lived in the Andean region and their treatment of the dead varied considerably, ranging from natural to assisted mummification.

Preservation of the body could be achieved by desiccation or freeze-drying, processes helped by the natural climatic conditions in desert and mountainous areas found all over the Andean region. Bodies could also be treated and preserved using alcohol (from chicha maize beer).

Early Andean cultures also used salt as a preservative and often removed the flesh and bodily fluids from the corpse prior to burial.

Mummies were typically placed in the fetal position and wrapped into bundles using several layers of textiles, bound with cords, and sometimes a head cloth was added.

Important individuals were clothed and wrapped in high-quality fabrics and jewelry. The dead person’s possessions were interred along with their owner, sometimes along with the tools of their profession.

The Cajamarquilla Rope-bound Mummy

While the Cajamarquilla rope-bound mummy’s gender has not precisely been identified, it appears to be an adult male. It was found in an underground chamber tomb placed in the fetal position and bound with ropes that kept the mummy in a tight crouch for over 1,200 years. It was buried with offerings including ceramics, stone tools, and gourds containing vegetable remains. 

The ancient site of Cajamarquilla, where the rope-bound mummy was discovered, was situated along a trade route linking the high Andes to urban settlements on the coast.

It became an important center of commerce in the Late Intermediate Period (1000 – 1470), which was a time between empires in the Andes when many regional groups reorganized and gained power. Its prosperity was reflected in its large public buildings, boulevards, and squares.

Both the fetal position and rope-binding were funerary practices common among the late pre-Hispanic peoples of the high Andes. The mummy therefore shows that Cajamarquilla was inhabited not just by coastal peoples from the immediate area, but also by people of Andean origin from the mountains. Possibly, its importance as a trading center linking the coast to the mountains, resulted in people from the Andes settling there as well.

Peruvian mummies along with their grave goods have helped archaeologists greatly in extending their understanding of pre-Hispanic indigenous Andean cultures. Detailed examinations of the most recent find are sure to add to this understanding.