A temple burial discovered in Peru from roughly 3,800 years ago pre-dates the rise of the Incan Empire.
Archaeologists found four skeletal remains, all laid facing the mountains, the source of water for the region.
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| Milton Rodriguez//Getty Images |
Finding burial remains from pre-Incan times casts a new light on the history of South America.
In the pre-Incan region of northwest Peru, the worship of water isn’t hard to understand considering that, while located in the Andes, the area also features high desert, meaning water coming from the mountains offered a vital source of life.
The dependence on that source of life was enough to inspire a cult roughly 3,800 years ago. And archaeologists now know just a tad more about that time, thanks to the discovery of four skeletal remains—two children, a teenager, and an adult—in a temple associated with water worship.
Each of the bodies uncovered in the Temple Queneto 2 in the Queneto archaeological site in Peru was placed on its side facing the mountains, according to a translated statement from the National University of Trujillo. The temple is known for its association with the water-centric cult, and that they would place the bodies of their dead in some form of prostration towards their primary water source adds a lot of credence towards the idea that they believed the nourishment they got from some good old-fashioned H2O was not just physical.
The burial area included funerary goods of stone pendants and snail shells, decorum that was previously associated with the group, and pottery shards were found across the temple site.
Located in Peru’s Viru Valley, the temple site is likely from sometime between 1800 to 900 BC, known as the Early Formative period, predating the powerful Incan Empire. The people living in the region were known for helping start the craze of constructing large buildings, including some of the earliest pyramids of the area. They also featured ceramics in their construction.
The temple in particular was built with cobblestone and clay plaster walls that featured curved corners.
“These environments,” Castillo Lujan, professor in the university’s Professional School of Archaeology, said in a statement, “characterized by curved corners, show unique architecture from the Early Formative periodt. Furthermore, fragments of early ceramics found at the site are similar to those observed in other important settlements such as Gramalote, in the Moche Valley, and Huaca Negra, near the coast in the Viru Valley.”
The Viru Valley is known for a richness in archaeological evidence of the ancient civilizations of the region, but locating such a find from upwards of 3,800 years ago—the research team says that this excavation covered just 1 percent of the total area of the massive archaeological site—improves the knowledge base from a time there is still relatively little burial information to draw from.
The research team hopes the government will take these recent discoveries—and others in the archaeological area—as a call to transform the Viru Valley “into a benchmark for cultural tourism and a bastion of Peruvian identity.”
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