An intact tomb preserved for 600 years opens a window onto the world of the Chimú elite in Peru

For more than six centuries, a compact mass of stone kept looters and treasure hunters away from a tomb at Chan Chan, the largest adobe city in the Americas. Beneath those fill deposits, in the walled complex of Utzh An, the former Great Chimú Palace, a team of Peruvian archaeologists uncovered a nearly intact funerary platform. The discovery took place in Trujillo, in the La Libertad region, within the ancient capital of the Chimú kingdom on Peru’s northern coast.

The structure is a square platform measuring nearly 17 meters on each side and five meters high, with a central chamber and two side chambers. There, the remains of a principal individual — possibly a member of the Chimú elite — and the remains of 37 other people with complete skeletons were found. The principal skull shows a red pigment that must be analyzed to determine whether it is cinnabar, a bright red, contaminant mineral composed of mercury sulfide; some of the other bodies show similar coloration. Metal weapons and copper and gold objects were also recovered.

“A find like this is very important because, generally, what was known about elite burials in Chimú society came from looted platforms, private collections, and museum holdings, and there was no scientific data on the individuals and their corresponding artifacts and associations,” archaeologist Jorge Meneses Bartra, who is in charge of the investigation and presented the findings this week, tells El PAÍS.

Meneses leads the Chan Chan Archaeological Complex Special Project (PECACH), sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, now in its eighth season. The route to the chamber began four years ago, when the team carried out a shallow excavation of the platform and detected a small depression. In May they decided to return. “Our intuition as archaeologists forced us to keep working on this platform until we found the entrance,” he says. According to Meneses, the stone fill ended up functioning as an inadvertent defense against looters.

The principal individual raises another question. Unlike the other individuals, their bones are not complete. The archaeologist believes the explanation may lie in a practice known in Andean societies: moving the dead after burial. “There have always been reburial processes in Andean societies. They moved their mummies. They even removed parts of skeletons to obtain family relics from the deceased. This leads us to think the mummy had been moved before the platform was covered,” he says.

The platform belongs to a culture that flourished on Peru’s northern coast between AD 900 and 1470, before Inca expansion. Chan Chan was its political center and one of its greatest symbols of power. Members of the ruling class were buried on funerary platforms within large walled compounds. That is why the weapons, precious metals and pigments matter beyond their material value. Laboratory analysis will have to determine their relationship to each individual, what hierarchies existed among them, and to what extent this tomb changes what was believed about Chimú elites.

The discovery was made by an entirely Peruvian team. It comprises 98 people including archaeologists, surveyors, conservators, photographers, civil engineers, and laborers. For Meneses the story has a personal resonance. He says he decided to pursue archaeology after the 1987 discovery of the intact tomb of the Lord of Sipán in neighboring Lambayeque. Nearly four decades later, he now leads research to study a burial ritual performed by that elite.

But perhaps the detail that most expands the scope of the find lies outside the tomb. The protected zone of Chan Chan covers 1,414 hectares, and only a fraction has been excavated. “No more than 7% of Chan Chan’s total area has been excavated. Evidently the citadel has much more to tell,” Meneses says. The project has focused mainly on the perimeter walls of its nine walled compounds, while much of the interior remains uninvestigated. Excavations will conclude in a week and laboratory analyses will begin. After that will come conservation and the closing of the areas ahead of the heavy rains expected in November. The tomb waited 600 years to be discovered; the archaeologists are now racing against the clock.

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