Ancient Mausoleum Discovered Along Peruvian Coast

An ancient mausoleum complex was found under a ruined citadel and uncovered by archaeologists in Peru’s northern coast, officials in the nation announced this week. This is the first time experts have found an untouched tomb in the city.

The Chan Chan site, once the capital of the Chimu kingdom, which ruled over much of Peru’s coast prior to the Inca, has been undergoing excavations for decades, with much of the area plundered due to centuries of conquest by the Inca, Spanish colonizers, and looters. Near present-day Trujillo, Chan Chan was the biggest city of the Americas in its prime, complete with gardens, plazas, pyramids, and mausoleums spread across nine square miles.

“It was a feeling of anxiety and urgency, to know if we were really in front of a chamber that had never been looted,” archaeologist Jorge Meneses, who is overseeing the excavations, told the New York Times. “In that moment we realized that the chamber had not been looted.” 

Inside the massive adobe brick ruins was a stairway descending eight feet into the middle of the mausoleum, with a chamber flanked on each side by a larger room. While one person was buried in the central chamber, the eastern room was almost empty and the western room contained a hoard of artifacts and the remains of some 20 people. Eighteen additional human remains were found in other parts of the complex.

A bright red pigment was identified on the skull and some additional bones on remains in the central chamber, along with two others on the funeral platform. Experts suspect the pigment may be cinnabar, a mercury sulfide mineral that held immense spiritual and ritualistic value for the Chimu, explicitly reserved for high-ranking members of society.

Ear ornaments, silver- or copper-plated necklaces, and jewelry made of quartz, shells, and semiprecious stones were also found among a number of the remains. A large amount of metal weapons and heavy beads were also uncovered, along with a wooden chest decorated with images of seabirds and monkeys that contained colorful textiles.

The design of the tombs, along with evidence from Chimu art, indicates that mausoleums of this kind were “designed to be open,” Gabriel Prieto, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, who was not involved in the research, also told the Times. Chimu people would leave bodies or offerings and take human remains “out of those burials to be placed on plazas and venerated as ancestors.”

Overall, the tomb contained a total of 38 bodies and countless artifacts intended as offerings for the dead, who are believed to be Chimu elite. The mausoleum, measuring 55 feet along each side and 16 feet high, is approximately 600 years old, dating to a period just before or possibly during the Inca conquest of the region in the mid-1400s.

Excavations at the site are still ongoing at this time, while the recovered remains are undergoing further analysis. This discovery stands to provide a wealth of information on Chimu burial practices and cultural elite, as well as a pivotal historical moment in the ancient Americas, as the established Chimu kingdom faced the rising Inca empire.