Not so long ago, my interest in mummies led me to Argentina where scientists were in the midst of doing numerous tests on them, such as MRIs, CAT scans, and DNA needle biopsies. I got in touch with National Geographic to see if I might be allowed to visit the mummies, and I was told, “Okay,” as long as I didn’t say a word about it until after the cover story was published.
It was a cool, bright morning when I arrived in Salta, a city in northwestern Argentina that has become a center of archaeological investigations of Inca and other pre-Columbian Indian cultures. There I joined the archaeologists who had headed the expedition on an Andean volcano peak on the Argentine-Chilean border, where they had discovered three perfectly preserved five-hundred-year-old mummies of Inca children who had been offered as ritual sacrifices and buried with gold, silver, and pots of food. The archaeologists took me in a Jeep along a dusty road to Catholic University, where a small building had been turned into a temporary laboratory that was heavily patrolled by guards armed with machine guns. Grave robbers, like pirates, have remained a constant threat to our society, even in remote locations.
As I watched the archaeologists carry the first small bundle from a freezer and set it on a paper-covered examination table, I realized that unwrapping the frozen remains of two Inca girls and a boy who had been killed half a millennium ago was not unlike my working car accidents and violent crime scenes. The major difference is that in archaeology, the artifacts and causes of death are studied with no thought of bringing anyone to justice, but rather to interpret a mysterious and elusive past, which in this case was that of a people who had no written language but revealed their history through elaborate textile weaving and art. I confess that I didn’t care much about diseases, diets, costumes, and customs, but was preoccupied with whether the Inca children had been unconscious, due to altitude and ritual alcoholic drinks like chicha (corn beer), when they were buried alive.
I wondered what the two girls and boy thought when they were dressed in fine woven outfits, feathered headdresses, and jewelry, and taken by processions up 22,057 feet to the summit of Mount Llullaillaco. I hoped they didn’t know what was happening when they were wrapped in cloth and placed sitting up in deep graves that the Incas finally filled with rocks and earth in hopes that the gods would be pleased.
I can still envision the faces of those three murdered children, especially the boy, who was possibly around eight years old when he was dressed in fur-trimmed moccasins and a silver bracelet, and sent on his journey to the Afterlife with two extra pairs of sandals and a sling for hunting. His expression was one of distress and protest, and his knees were drawn in a fetal position, his ankles tightly bound with cord. I suspected he had been alert and none too happy about his role in religion, and I had a bad feeling that he resisted and was awake as he was smothered with soil and stone. The girls, possibly eight and fourteen, were not bound and looked rather placid, but oddly, one of their graves had been struck by lightning, and when the little mummy was unwrapped in the makeshift lab in Salta, I could still smell the odor of burned human flesh. It seemed to me that the Almighty had let the Incas know that He wasn’t pleased in the least about their burying little children alive.
Not much ever changes, I’m sorry to say. Continuing to research our past, I spent time at the Jamestown excavation site and made pilgrimages to Great Britain, trying to connect the First Settlers with those who had gotten stalled in the Thames. I explored Isle of Dogs downriver mud, marshes, bars and car parks, and the Millennium Dome that rises like a giant poached egg spiked with gold-painted cranes, but I could find no trace of John Smith or his fellow travelers and not one living person who could remember a thing.
Nor did anyone in the pubs and alehouses I visited seem remotely impressed with the little-known fact that Tangier Island has an Isle of Dogs connection because Tangier was discovered by Captain John Smith in 1608.