What do you do when you find that all your long-dead and buried relatives do not perish but remain with you through natural mummyification? You are going to imitate the process. Seven thousand years ago, in this way, a lively death cult arose among hunter-gatherers in the Chilean Atacama Desert. Researchers write about this in the scientific journal PNAS this week.
The ancient Egyptians are one of the champions of treating and wrapping their dead. The result is a mummy, a well-preserved body of a deceased. But the Egyptians started it relatively late.
A group of hunter-gatherers known as the Chinchurro culture, who lived in Chile's Atacama Desert, practiced the art of mummification as early as seven to eight thousand years ago. They were the first to try to preserve their dead in this way.
But how did this usage come about? The researchers at PNAS do have an idea. The coastal Atacama Desert is one of the oldest and driest deserts in the world. Small meltwater streams from the nearby Andes Mountains allowed the Chinchurro people to survive. According to the researchers, due to, among other things, an increase in rainfall, a rise in the groundwater level and inventions such as better fishing hooks and harpoons, there was even a population explosion about seven thousand years ago.
More dead than living
As the population grew, and more and more the people went into the desert to bury their dead, they saw something special. The corpses did not perish in the bone-dry desert sand, but slowly dried up into a 'natural mummy' that is still recognizable to relatives. Over time, due to population growth, there were many more mummies than there were living people. The Chinchurros probably buried their dead close to home, so that every member of the community was confronted with many mummies during his daily work.
In many ancient cultures, the dead are part of the community until the body has completely perished. In the case of the Chinchurro culture, this view may have emerged relatively early, because the mummies were literally part of the natural landscape. The continued presence of all the dead—albeit in a different physical state—may have greatly influenced the way the living thought about death. This allowed for a particularly high degree of cultural complexity for that time.
The researchers hypothesize that the Chinchurros started making their own mummies around 7,000 years ago because they wanted to reflect their natural environment. In the beginning they mummified only babies and children, later adults as well. That suggests that ancestor worship originally played no role in mummification. Later on, different methods were even developed to preserve the dead as best as possible. They also decorated the mummies with dyes and human hair. It is not entirely clear whether mummification, apart from reflection on the natural environment, had a religious or symbolic meaning.
Around 4400 years ago, artificial mummification was over in the Atacama. The researchers' data shows that climate changes, including a sharp drop in rainfall in the Andes, made the environment significantly less livable. The amount of food available from the sea also decreased. According to the researchers, this would be due to the arrival of a periodic warm gulf stream, which we now call El-Nino.