In ‘Lost World,’ a Frantic Rush to Preserve Inca Mummies

Hundreds of mummies were uncovered recently at an Inca burial site, the main portion of which lies just under the surface of a modern-day schoolyard in a shantytown near Lima, Peru.

Tonight on PBS, in “Inca Mummies: Secrets of a Lost World” (9 p.m., KCET, KVCR), National Geographic Explorer teams are seen rushing to salvage what remains of the schoolyard burials and two other archeological sites.

Their finds could shed light on the development and conquest of the Inca Empire, famed for its roadways, complex communications system and high-altitude terrace irrigation system.

But the sites are threatened by humans. Once “a sacred place, undisturbed for hundreds of years,” in the words of archeologist Guillermo Cock, the area was leveled in 1998 by Tupac Amaru Indians using bulldozers.

Now, Tupac Amaru children crowd in to watch as the scientific team gently sifts the soil, brushes away the dust of ages and lifts out the fragile mummies wrapped in cloth--”mummy bundles”--that can contain as many as six family members and grave goods that had been laid to rest five centuries ago.

The cameras also follow archeologist Peter Frost to a high-altitude site of human sacrifices and to Vilcabamba, the site of an Incan settlement.

They also record the preliminary laboratory examinations of the mummy bundles.

But the focus always returns to the desperate rush to excavate the Tupac Amaru site. Here the incongruous sounds of the playground, the chatter of children, are heard under the footage of the desecrated faces of the Incas, underscoring the urgency of the scientists’ race against time--and the sewage pipes, power lines and other emblems of progress that may someday destroy the last traces of the Inca Empire.