In 1997, an archaeological site with several funerary houses built in the cliffs of a Peruvian lake called Laguna de los Condores was discovered. This site was built by the Chachapoya people in the “cloud forest” at a sea level of 2500 m in the Amazonas/San Martin area in Peru. The Chachapoya people and their culture are not yet fully understood, and some myths entwine around the origin of that South American ancient civilisation. The Chachapoya are described as people of warriors, which were finally subdued by the Incas in the late 15th century AD. A typical characteristic of their culture is the special burial of their dead in funeral bundles containing the remains of the bodies. At the Laguna de los Condores more that 200 mummies have been found. The mummies were transferred to a newly built museum in the nearby village of Leymebamba. During the rescue work of the mummies, which were in danger to be further destroyed by looters, two different burial patterns were detected. It is assumed, that after conquering of the Chachapoyas, the Inca people took over also the burial cliff houses and used it for their own burials. Another explanation for the change of the burial pattern could be that the conquered Chachapoyas took on the Inca techniques for mummification in the course of colonization. The Incas themselves were subdued by the Spanish Conquistadors in 1532 AD. In order to shed light on the transition from the Chachapoya to the Inka dominance, which is connected with the history of the Laguna de los Condores funeral site, a multidisciplinary project between archaeologists, anthropologists and physicists has been started. VERA contributes to this project with 22 radiocarbon dates of archaeological objects and of the mummies from this Chachapoya/Inca site. The impact of these results will be discussed.
See more of Poster Session I
See more of The 10th International Conference on Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (September 5-10, 2005)