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<< Our Photo Pages >> San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum - Museum in Chile

Submitted by bat400 on Friday, 06 June 2014  Page Views: 21299

MuseumsSite Name: San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum
Country: Chile Type: Museum
Nearest Town: Arica, Chile  Nearest Village: San Miguel de Azapa
Latitude: 18.5166S  Longitude: 70.1809W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 5 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
 4

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San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum
San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum submitted by KaiHofmann : Rock with petroglyphs in the Parque de petroglifos of the Museum. Thanks to Michael Moll for this image. (Vote or comment on this photo)
Museum in Arica Provence, Chile.
This archaeological museum associated with the University of Tarapacá is ten km east of Arica, down the Azapa Valley. More than 20,000 artefacts are displayed, depicting the 10,000 year history of human culture in northern Chile. The area around Arica is one of the driest on earth and the location of cemeteries of the oldest intentionally preserved human remains in the world - the Chinchorro Mummies.

The culture of the Chinchorro (Fisher-folk) dates to 7,000 BC with habitation and shell middens. The Chinchorro lived a semi-nomadic life on the coasts of what are now northern Chile and southern Peru. Analysis of remains indicates their diet was mostly seafood. Chinchorro is the type site for the culture is located on the beach below Morro de Arica. They left little evidence of their homes or personal belongings aside from stone tools, twine and remants of basketry and smiple braided or tied textiles, which makes their ornate burial practices unusual in comparison and demonstrates that complex religious or ideological concepts do not require a substantial material culture.

The oldest of the mummified burials of the Chinchorro predate Egyptian mummies by 3000 years (6000 BC). The famous mummies of the Chinchorro were created by removing the skin of the dead, defleshing the remains, and replacing the skin over the frame of the skeleton. Grasses and other plants were used for internal stuffing, and the skin covered with mineral paints. Mummification was performed on all members of the society, including children, and indications of repair and repainting imply that the remains were not immediately buried.

The Chinchorro burial sites and habitations vary around the Arica area. One of the primary sites was Morro-I, directly on the beach below the imposing Moro de Arica that rises over modern Arica. That site and others were excavated by Max Uhle in the early 20th century.

Among other Sources: Momias Chinchorro - Patrimonio de Todos.

Note: In comments: Students Discover 7,000-Year-Old Mummy in Chile.
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San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum
San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum submitted by KaiHofmann : Rock with petroglyphs in the Parque de petroglifos of the Museum. Thanks to Michael Moll for this image. (Vote or comment on this photo)

San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum
San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum submitted by KaiHofmann : The info board. Thanks to Michael Moll for this image. (Vote or comment on this photo)

San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum
San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum submitted by bat400_photo : Example of a mummy from the Chinchorro culture, found in Northern Chile. Similar to exhibits at the San Miguel de Azapa museum. Photo originally posted to Flickr as cultura chinchorro año 3000 AC. Author: Pablo Trincado, 26 Sept 2008 (2008-09-26) This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. (Vote or comment on this photo)

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d027574 Arica Archeologisch Museum San Miguel de Azapa
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MUSEO UNIVERSIDAD DE TARAPAC "SAN MIGUEL DE AZAPA"
MUSEO UNIVERSIDAD DE TARAPAC "SAN MIGUEL DE AZAPA"

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 5.1km WSW 257° Cerro Sagrado Geoglyphs Hill Figure or Geoglyph
 6.4km SE 130° Azapa Valley Geoglyphs* Hill Figure or Geoglyph
 7.4km W 273° La Tropilla Geoglyphs* Hill Figure or Geoglyph
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 152.0km NW 311° Museo Chiribaya Museum
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 170.2km SSE 155° Tarapacá geoglyphs Hill Figure or Geoglyph
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 288.3km NNE 32° Suriki Island* Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 293.2km N 6° Puno Fertility Sanctuary* Ancient Temple
 296.7km NNE 22° La Fuente del Inca* Holy Well or Sacred Spring
 308.6km NNW 336° Sumbay Rock Art
 310.9km N 0° Sillustani necropolis* Ancient Temple
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"San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum" | Login/Create an Account | 8 News and Comments
  
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Students Discover 7,000-Year-Old Mummy in Chile by bat400 on Friday, 06 June 2014
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A group of students discovered a 7,000-year-old mummy in northern Chile, the media reported on Monday.

The mummy was found in El Laucho beach at the foothills of Morro de Arica, La Tercera newspaper reported, according to Xinhua.

The students were part of an archaeology workshop and were investigating the site of a landslide caused by the 8.2-magnitude earthquake that hit the region April 1.

The students from the Escuela America school were performing an excavation when they found the mummy.

The mummy belongs to the Chinchorro culture and has an estimated age of 7,000 years. Authorities from the Chilean National Heritage Office arrived at the site to investigate the remains.

Chinchorro culture consists of fishermen villages located in the coast of Atacama desert, from Ilo in Peru in the north to Antofagasta in the south between 7020 BC and 1500 BC.

Thanks to coldrum for the link. Source: http://www.ndtv.com
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Climate change shaped ancient burial rituals in Chile by bat400 on Tuesday, 14 August 2012
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Development of Chinchorro mummification practices coincided with a population boom, researchers say.

A relatively wet climatic period may have triggered the development 7000 years ago of complex culture in hunter-gatherer communities in the Atacama Desert, including the earliest known examples of ritual mummification.

Bands of hunter-gatherers lived along the Atacama coastline from 11000 BC to 500 BC, but the Chinchorro began mummifying their dead only around 5000 BC. An early Archaic burial (dated 9000-8000 BC) that uses similar funerary symbols to the later mummy burials suggests that mummification was a local development, rather than being introduced from elsewhere.

Regional climate records for the time, based on the periodic appearance of certain plants in the rock records, indicate that there was a period of greater rainfall across the Andes above the Atacama between 5800 BC and 4700 BC, which would have charged groundwater reserves in the usually dry desert of northern Chile and southern Peru. Springs would have begun discharging water and creeks would have filled.

The Chinchorro, who lived in fishing settlements along the coast, would have flourished under these relatively benign conditions, the researchers believe. By combining 460 dates from 131 archaeological sites in the Atacama with existing data on how hunter-gather populations fluctuated elsewhere, the researchers developed a model which indicates that the Chinchorro experienced a hike in population density between 5000–3000 BC.

“Environmental change acted as a positive and creative force in the building up of social complexity, instead of being associated with the collapse of society, as is usually emphasized,” says Pablo Marquet (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago,) a co-author of the study.

Ritualistic mummification by the Chinchorro may have evolved as a result of the population increase, the researchers say. “Dead corpses do not decompose in the coastal desert, so an increase in population size means an increase in corpses that become naturally mummified because of the extremely dry environment,” Marquet says. As the population increased, it would have become increasingly likely that the living would come across a mummified corpse, he says.

The work builds on the theory that population increase drives technological innovation — the Chinchorro's complicated mummification procedures are a form of ritualistic technology, the researchers say.

The Chinchorro developed various elaborate mummification styles, including painting the skin with red ochre or black manganese as well as disassembling the body. Such complex rituals indicate a complex society, and the period coincided with innovations in fishing tools.
Around 4,400 years ago, the practice disappeared from the region. A flurry of warm El Niño currents decreased marine food sources, which is thought to have caused the eventual Chinchorro decline. Marquet suggests that as the population dropped, mummification skills were lost in the wake.

For more, read the article by Helen Thompson at nature.com.
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    Good times led to grisly custom by bat400 on Tuesday, 04 September 2012
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    A similar article from Science News:

    A population boom sparked by increased rainfall and a burgeoning supply of seafood may have led members of South America’s Chinchorro culture to start mummifying their dead long before the ancient Egyptians started salt-drying their pharaohs for eternal life.

    Chinchorro hunter-gatherers invented the earliest known mummification procedures about 7,000 years ago, when the group’s population was rising. Increasing numbers of Chinchorro couldn’t help occasionally seeing bodies of dead comrades that had naturally mummified in shallow graves dug in the coastal Atacama Desert of northern Chile and southern Peru, says a team led by ecologist Pablo Marquet of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. Those encounters with deceased individuals who seemingly refused to let their bodies decompose inspired the Chinchorro to invent artificial mummification procedures, Marquet and his colleagues conclude in a paper published online the week of August 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    Marquet’s environmental explanation for the invention of Chinchorro mummification practices is plausible but can’t be proven with current evidence, remarks anthropologist Daniel Sandweiss of the University of Maine in Orono. “Perhaps someone who encounters Marquet’s article will be inspired to innovate a new way to test his hypothesis, just as encountering natural mummies in the Atacama Desert may have led Chinchorro people to create artificial mummification,” Sandweiss says.

    Evidence from an ice core previously extracted from a mountainous part of Bolivia indicates that increased rainfall between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago along South America’s Pacific coast boosted the availability of fresh water and seafood for Chinchorro people, Marquet’s team reports.

    An analysis of remains from 460 previously excavated Chinchorro sites indicated that population numbers rose markedly starting about 7,000 years ago. Chinchorro numbers temporarily dropped around 4,900 years ago before plunging at 4,200 years ago, the researchers say.

    Thanks to coldrum for the link: http://www.sciencenews.org.
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Arsenic-laced water may have killed off coastal peoples in Chile. by bat400 on Tuesday, 27 April 2010
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Submitted by coldrum, a similar article on the subject, this one from National Geographic --


Poison-laced drinking water killed some of the world's oldest mummies, which are found in the harsh northern deserts of Chile, a new study says.

Arsenic, which occurs in high levels in drinking water in Chile's northern Camarones Valley (see map), the deadly element likely poisoned the coastal Chinchorro people for centuries, starting at least 7,000 years ago, mummy-hair analyses show.

"I believe [these] ancient people were continuously exposed to arsenic by drinking contaminated water with high arsenic levels [that is] endemic to the Camarones region," said study leader Bernardo Arriaza of Chile's Universidad de Tarapacá de Arica.



For more, see nationalgeographic.com.
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Andean mummies afflicted with arsenic by bat400 on Monday, 05 April 2010
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A more recent story on Bernardo Arriaza's continuing research on arsenic levels in the Chinchorro mummies of Chile. See USA Today's Science Fair, from coldrum.
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GMC geology professor to dig into Chilean burial methodsods by Andy B on Sunday, 14 February 2010
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A Vermont college professor will use a Fulbright Grant to explore the origins of some of the world's oldest mummies.

Geologist John Van Hoesen will leave for Chile in early 2011 to join in studies of mummies left behind by the Chinchorro people. He will work with a Chilean colleague.

Van Hoesen said the Chinchorro mummies, which predate the Egyptians at 5,000 to 7,000 years old, are some of the best preserved ever found.

"There's a great example of a mummy where you can still see the wrinkles in the skin of their fingers," he said. "The preservation process is kind of morbid and disgusting, but really interesting to archeologists."

The Chinchorro would skin their dead, disassemble the bodies, make a frame for them from reeds and then sew the skin back on. Then they would cover them with clay. The clay they used contained manganese, which is where Van Hoesen comes in.

"There's absolutely no manganese anywhere near the sites where they buried these bodies," he said. "The reason that is interesting — finding the source of those materials would help explain where the people in this part of South America came from."

The nearest known manganese deposits are 60 to 80 kilometers away from the site. Van Hoesen said most archeologists believe the Chinchorro would not have traveled more than 40 kilometers. In the arid landscape, they would have had to carry water with them.

"That's a long way to walk just to get materials to mummify your dead," he said.

Another theory holds that the Chinchorro used a local source of the mineral that they exhausted.

"That theory isn't very strong," Van Hoesen said. "The geology there around the coast — it shouldn't support manganese."

Van Hoesen will do chemical comparisons between the manganese on the mummies and at the remote sites. If they match, Van Hoesen said, it will lend credibility to the theory that the Chinchorro were highland people who moved to the coast.

Van Hoesen also plans to hike up two river beds in the area, looking into the possibility that manganese might have washed downstream. He said it will take him five to seven days to reach potential deposit sites for testing.

Van Hoesen will work with Bernardo Arriaza of the Instituto de Alta Investigación, Universidad de Tarapacá and the San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum. Van Hoesen said he met Arriaza while Arriaza was a graduate student at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Arriaza has previously helped test soil at the burial sites.

While in Chile, Van Hoesen said he will also teach a course on geographic information systems, incorporating some of the field work for the project into the class, and teach workshops on use of a scanning electron microscope.

Van Hoesen is the fourth faculty member at GMC to recently get a grant from the Fulbright Program, which promotes cooperation between American and foreign academics. The program has sent a Green Mountain art professor to Korea, and education professor to Slovakia and an ecologist to Japan.

Source:
http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20100131/NEWS01/1310370/1002/NEWS01
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Parent's Keepsake of Mummified Children reveals a poisoned society by bat400 on Sunday, 19 July 2009
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Submitted by coldrum ---
The world’s first mummies: arsenic poisoning victims in Chile in 5000 BC

Seven thousand years ago, about 100 km from the contemporary port city of Arica in Chile, a child died. The grieving parents did not want to part with the last remains. They removed the head and internal organs of the child, stuffed it with animal hide, painted a clay model of his head and decorated it with tufts of his hair.

The delicately preserved body was excavated in 1983. Archaeologists believe it is the earliest mummy. More than 100 child mummies were discovered in Camarones near Arica that year. Later, preserved bodies of adults were found as well. Archaeologists say the embalmed bodies were of people from Chile’s Chinchorro community.

Unlike mummies in later civilizations—most notably Egypt that flourished for 2,500 years beginning 3,000 BC—that spun around prestige, wealth and power, Chinchorro mummification was based on a democratic and humanistic view of the dead, and everyone was mummified.

Archaeologist Bernardo Arriaza, who studies the Chinchorro at the University of Tarapaca in Arica, wrote that unlike the Egyptians who hid the dead, the Chilean community embraced them. The child mummies even took their place besides their parents at the dinner table.
A few years ago Arriaza launched a daring new theory: the Chinchorro were victims of arsenic poisoning.

“I was reading a Chilean newspaper that talked about pollution and it had a map of arsenic and lead pollution, and it said arsenic caused abortions. I jumped in my seat and said, That’s it,” Arriaza said.

Following the lead, Arriaza collected 46 hair samples from Chinchorro excavated from 10 sites in northern Chile. Ten samples from the Camarones river valley had an average of 37.8 microgrammes per gramme—much higher than one to 10 microgramme of arsenic per gramme that indicates chronic toxicity according to World Health Organization (who) standards. The sample from an infant’s mummy had a residue of 219 microgramme per gramme.

Arriaza has an explanation. Chinchorros were a fishing society. They collected plants along river mouths and hunted both sea mammals and wild birds. They made fishhooks out of shellfish, bone or cactus needles, spear throwers were used to hunt sea lions and wild camelids, while both lithic points and knives were manufactured using flint stones.

The Chinchorro lacked ceramic vessels, metal objects and woven textiles, but this was not a social handicap: their simple yet efficient fishing technology allowed them to thrive along the Pacific coasts.

But life was not without dangers. In the 1960s tests on water drawn by the city of Antofagasta in the Camarones river valley showed that it was laced with 860 microgrammes of arsenic per litre—86 times higher than the limits acceptable by who.

Arriaza believes this was so even 7,000 years ago. Tests on the Chinchorro mummies strengthen the arsenic poisoning theory.

“In highly stratified societies like ours, lower-class children receive simple or meager mortuary disposal. But in a small group, the death of children certainly threatened the survival of the entire group. Affection and grief may thus have triggered the preservation of children,” the archaeologist said.

For more, see downtoearth.org.
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4,500-year-old mummies discovered in Chile by bat400 on Wednesday, 24 September 2008
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originally submitted by coldrum.

Eight perfectly preserved mummies, believed to be some 4,500 year old, were found by workers engaged in a restoration project in Chile's far north, Spain's EFE news agency reported on Saturday quoting media report.
"These mummies date back to between 2,000 BC and 5,000 BC." archaeologist Calogero Santoro told the daily El Mercurio.

The mummies are remains of individuals belonging to the Chinchorro culture, which was one of the first to practice mummification and the perfect condition in which the mummies were found is indicative of their advanced techniques.

Three of the eight skeletons have been kept on the site in the Morro de Arica site for visitors to see while the other five were taken to Tarapaca University in northern Chile, where other mummies found in previous years are preserved.

Morro de Arica is known for its mummies. Several hundred of them, some as old as 7,000 years, were discovered in 1983 in the area.

The mummies found in northern Chile date back even earlier than the ones discovered in Egypt, making them one of the world's oldest. The Council of National Monuments of Chile seeks to have the mummies declared as archaeological patrimony of humanity by the UNESCO.



For more, see the article.
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