Arica, Chile:
Chile’s Chinchorro mummies, the oldest in the world to have been purposefully preserved by humans, had been added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List on Tuesday.
The mummies, which had been located in the north of Chile at the get started of the 20th century, are more than 7,000 years old, which means they pre-date the Egyptian mummies by two millennia.
The United Nations’ cultural organization announced on Twitter that it had added the “settlement and artificial mummification of the Chinchorro culture” to its prestigious list in the course of a virtual meeting chaired by China.
“UNESCO is validating on an international level, through different experts, that the settlements and artificial mummification of the Chinchorro culture has exceptional value, that it has a global importance,” Chilean anthropologist Bernardo Arriaza told AFP.
The Chinchorro had been fishers and hunter gatherers more than 7,000 years ago in an location exactly where the desert and Pacific Ocean meet in what is today the south of Peru and north of Chile.
So far, more than 300 mummies have been located, such as red, black and bandaged ones.
The mummification procedure consisted of removing the organs, intestines and tissue.
The skin was then ripped off the corpse and the body rebuilt employing sticks and animal hair, even though a thick head of black hair was sewn onto the scalp.
Finally the mummies had been painted red or black employing earth, pigments, manganese and iron oxide.
“These bodies are very finely made by specialists. There’s a subtlety, a creativity by these first populations,” added Arriaza, who is the director of the Chinchorro Center at the Tarapaca University in the city of Arica.
Why the Chichorro culture mummified their dead remains a mystery.
In 2005, Arriaza created a theory that it could have been linked to higher levels of arsenic poisoning in the water that could have made premature births, miscarriages, underweight children and higher infant mortality.
He recommended the mummification was “an emotional response from parents faced with these painful losses, so they painted them, dressed them up and every day this technique became more elaborate.”
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