Do you know where the oldest mummies in the world are located? The answer is not Egypt.
The Chinchorro people created the first mummies in the world along the coast of what is today northern Chile. In 2021, UNESCO listed the mummies and the Chinchorro settlement as a World Heritage Site, where many of their remains exist.
You can find them when you walk along the sandy coastal hillside near the village of Caleta Camarones at an old archeological site called Camarones 15. It was excavated in 1990, but there is so much more to be found across the region.
Cesar Cortes is a fisherman from the village of Caleta Camarones.
“If you go higher up the mountainside, you can see all of the layers of Chinchorro mummies that are up there,” Cortes said. “They’re covered in the sand. But they’re all over the top of the hillside.”
The Chinchorro people lived in small groups of 20 or 30 people along the coastline for thousands of years. They were fisher people and semi-nomadic. About 7,000 years ago, they began mummifying their dead. Over time, that included almost everyone: men, women and children. Even the unborn.
They removed the organs and filled the skeletons with wood, mud, earth and clay. The dry Atacama Desert has preserved many of these mummies until today.
Jannina Campos, an archeologist at the Chinchorro Management Center, said the oldest mummies were found in Caleta Camarones.
Campos believes the Chinchorro people began to mummify their relatives because people there were being poisoned by high levels of naturally occurring arsenic in their only freshwater source, the Camarones River. This led to miscarriages and stillbirths. Mummifying their lost children was their way of coping and holding on to their loved ones, she said.
“It’s impressive the value they gave to this mortuary ritual,” said Campos. “It’s like you’re still here. You’re still with me. And I want you to stay. Even though you can’t speak, you’re still with us.”
The practice spread and grew.
The San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum houses the largest collection of Chinchorro mummies. Dozens of them lie in little beds in a climate-controlled room in the back, and you can see them through a glass window.
“Can you imagine the amount of attention and the care they took with this mummification, that they put artificial faces on the mummies,” said archeologist Campos. “The masks had eyes, a nose and a mouth, possibly representing that they were still alive.”
Today, in Arica, a port city in northern Chile, there are performances honoring the Chinchorro people. There’s even a beach named for them. And several museums. Campos and others do talks at local schools. And archeologists no longer do digs. Now, when remains appear, they try to cover them back up and keep them where they’ve been preserved for millennia.
But everyone agrees much more needs to be done to spread awareness about this ancient culture.
“This is so impressive,” said Claudio Perez, who’s from out of town and had just visited the Azapa museum with his family. “We need to spread this information. Many people in Chile don’t know anything about the Chinchorro civilization. They don’t even know the name.”
But the Chinchorro are ever-present in Caleta Camarones. Carlos Concha, 70, has lived in the town for decades and believes the Chinchorro’s mummification practice was a way of attempting to pause time.
“We don’t want to die,” said Concha. “And if we die, what remains of us? I think that’s what they thought. They didn’t want to go, and this was a way of being reborn.”