Poverty Amid Antiquity : Mummies--Dilemma in Chile Desert

As neighbors, they are very quiet. --Mario Vasquez, watchman who lives amid tombs of 8,000-year-old mummies.

Here in the world’s driest desert, a belated effort is being made to achieve balance between the needs of modern man and humanity’s right to the secrets of ancestors dead for thousands of years.

The choices: Increased fresh water for today’s thirsty residents or an unmolested yesterday for the scientists of tomorrow. In Arica, where the archeological turf is so rich that banalities of daily life regularly intrude on history’s legacy, the debate can be both subtle and stark.

Recovery of 96 mummies that are judged the world’s oldest has beamed a sudden international spotlight on out-of-the-way Arica’s manifold buried treasures. The foreign interest, in turn, has focused local attention on conflicting priorities as never before.

Everybody wants to do the right thing. In an impoverished region of a poor country, however, the right thing is not always the best thing to do.

‘No Way to Save It’

“I have to say that there are times when we are called to examine a find and reluctantly realize we have no way to save it. We tell ‘em: ‘Go ahead, keep digging, pour your concrete,’ ” said Marvin Allison, a clinical pathologist who studies the diseases of man.

Along with his colleagues at Arica’s University of Tarapaca, Allison--who came to Chile three years ago after retiring as a professor at the Medical College of Virginia--is responsible for both the international and the local excitement.

The story began one November day in 1983. Ditch-diggers stumbled across an old cemetery as they prepared the footing for a new wall at the local water company. Around Arica, shallow cemeteries in the dull gray sand of the fierce but beautiful Atacama Desert are not uncommon. The Atacama is a unique, barely touched open-air museum. Plants will grow here if they are watered, but even the gardens have ghosts.

Man harvested the bountiful Pacific here at this coastal site long before historical times. What he buried lay unmolested through the ages, guarded against decay by the rainless desert. The naturally mummified debris of millennia, a treasure to scientists, has long been more of an annoyance to people who live here.

‘Just Tossed Aside’

“Around here you can’t build a patio without uncovering something old,” said Peter Woodbridge, the 78-year-old dean of local journalists. “Traditionally, they are just tossed aside. I’ve seen children playing with mummified babies and dogs chewing at ancient skin.”

The desert is huge, the sand easy to dig. Sites that span centuries sometimes lie side by side. There are 20th-Century cemeteries, the debris of a 19th-Century battlefield where Chile won Arica from Peru, colonial cemeteries from the days when Arica was the port for the fabled silver mines of Potosi in Bolivia, Inca cemeteries, pre-Incan fairgrounds, cemeteries stretching back to the shadowy days of a primitive fishing society called the Chinchorro.

On that November day in 1983, a workman digging at the water company construction site began turning up mummies--the event that was to cause Arica to begin reassessing its past.

“It’s a common thing nearly everywhere we dig, but these bodies seemed different,” said the water company’s president, Juan Valenzuela. The remains had been mummified not by time and the elements, but by man. University archeologists were notified.

There are many archeologists in Arica, but never enough. “There is work here for 50 archeologists for a century,” said Guillermo Focacci, director of the University of Tarapaca’s Institute of Anthropology.

The archeologists of Arica, in fact, are a kind of scientific fire brigade. They dash from impromptu roadside discovery to casual backyard find, deciding which spots should be preserved for posterity and which must be sacrificed to 20th-Century progress. As the university’s Allison puts it, “Almost everything we do is rescue work.”

‘Something Worth Saving’

There, on the steep hillside at the water company site, was something worth saving, the scientists concluded. And they faced the usual Third World dilemma of how to afford it.

“We couldn’t get a peso from the Chilean government,” Allison recalled. “I called the National Geographic Society, God bless ‘em, and they sent $4,000 to pay for digging them out.”

The modest investment would win a handsome return. Last year, carbon tests in a U.S. laboratory dated the site’s oldest mummies to around 6000 BC. That makes them the most ancient discovered anywhere--3,000 years older than the mummies of Egypt.

By Allison’s account, the finely wrought mummies were fashioned with fishermen’s patience and hunters’ skills. Each corpse was skinned, with a pelican beak used as a scalpel. Major muscles and organs, including the brain, were removed. The body was fire-dried using coals and hot ashes.

Mummy-masters filled each body cavity with minerals, wood or feathers and tied the chest tightly. They pulled the skin back on like a glove and sewed it in place. They built a clay mask to reconstruct the face and fashioned a wig from the corpse’s hair.

Reinforcing sticks run through the arms and legs, and subsequent damage to the face masks, as though by a fall, suggest to Allison that the mummies initially were placed upright as civic monuments.

Autopsy 8,000 years after death showed that about 25% of the men had signs of chronic ear infection and that many of the women had deformities in their leg bones. The message is plain to Allison and Chilean researchers: The men dove for shellfish; the women spent long hours squatting on their haunches to shell the catch.

Chinchorro Mummies

Similar mummies--although never dated as precisely or studied as closely--had been exhumed by a European archeologist in 1919, so the university published its findings without great fanfare. The newer discoveries were dubbed the Chinchorro mummies, named for a local beach. The best of them were put on display at the university museum, and local scientists went back about their rescue business.

In June, however, the belated fanfare was finally sounded, and nothing has been the same here since.

Back in Virginia to teach a course on paleopathology, Allison lectured on the Chinchorro mummies. Hurtling back to Chile came a news service account of the discovery of “the oldest mummies in the world.”

The university was bemused: the news was more than a year old.

But not, as it turns out, for some people in Arica.

“I still have not received official notification from the university of the discovery,” snapped Mayor Manuel Castillo. “We must defend our treasures.”

Once he has the full facts, Castillo promises a new ordinance to protect artifacts from casual diggers and professional grave robbers. La Estrella, Arica’s local newspaper, is also campaigning for greater awareness and protection. One of its reporters was astonished to find ancient grinding stones tossed casually aside from a waterworks trench down the street from the newspaper office.

‘Stop Work, Lose Money’

“Our workers now have standing instructions to stop and report any finds,” said Alfredo Bolomeny, an engineer at the water company. “Workers for private construction companies should do the same thing, but you have to ask yourself whether they really will. If you stop work, you lose money.”

In truth, there is not much money to spare in Arica, which is near Chile’s northern border with Peru and about half an hour by air from Bolivia’s lofty capital at La Paz. There is a large, smelly fish-meal plant and a strong Chilean army presence, but unemployment is 12% in a city of 167,000, and about 2,000 workers are employed at make-do public works jobs.

The latest of man’s enterprises consigned to the desert here are gap-toothed rows of abandoned factories, closed after the current military government in faraway Santiago ended the free-port status that had attracted industry to Arica in the first place.

Dreams that buried treasures might one day generate large-scale tourism are tempered by melancholic recognition that Arica, as ever, is a victim of its geography. It is 1,200 miles north of Santiago; Lima, the capital of neighboring Peru, is closer. Arica, like desert archeology, is light years away from major preoccupations of a central government wrestling with the volatile gamut of Third World economic, social and political ills.

Aricans say that is why the region’s archeological lode, which extends from the mummies to ancient four-color cave drawings and hillsides decorated with 1,000-year-old stylized renderings of animals and human figures--are less known to the outside world than they might be.

Mummy fame, though, has already made a difference in local public awareness. Workers building a new parking lot at the city jail produced a funny-looking hat with puma ears. It turned out to be 1,500 years old. The police gave Allison a pile of bones, wondering if they were archeological treasures or the remains of some recent murder victim.

Old Indian Marketplace

Public-spirited citizens reported some free-lance digging in the desert. When archeologists got there, they found grave sites that date to around the 3rd Century. More glumly, they contemplate the site of a 1,000-year-old Indian marketplace that is being irrigated for a crop of alfalfa.

“Luckily, there is very little gold,” said Allison. In a strange, poor and distant place where the relics of early man humble the capacity of his descendants to study them, large-scale treasure-seeking would be one burden too many. In Arica, science already has its hands full simply fending off neighborhood ditch-diggers and backyard gardeners.