Letters from the Desert

In the Lands of the Chinchorro (2)

Some readers may be old enough to remember Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982). For those who don’t, it’s a mainstream horror film, in which a Californian real estate company builds a planned community on a former cemetery, and an array of vengeful supernatural forces wreak havoc on the hapless suburbanites. Even viewers who didn’t believe in ghosts and spirits did not need much persuasion to suspend disbelief and accept its familiar premise: that if you build houses on cemeteries, it may bring unexpected consequences. Because in most modern Western societies, we don’t want the dead living too close to us, and we certainly don’t want them living underneath us.

The inhabitants of Arica have also discovered that their city was built on a cemetery, though so far the consequences have been less calamitous. Over the years, its inhabitants have become accustomed to finding bodies and body parts in unexpected places. Sometimes human remains are uncovered by wind, sea and earthquakes, or revealed during construction works. In 1983, archaeologists from the University of Tarapacá were called out to visit a trench, where workers laying pipes had found dozens of mummified corpses. In 2004, a hotel expansion at the foot of the Morro cliff face uncovered another series of bodies, and summoned the university’s specialists.

There was a time when Ariceńos didn’t always do this. Sometimes remains simply threw them away or reburied, because locals were fearful of being fined or not being able to finish the work they were doing. One taxi-driver told us how he and his cousins once encountered some mummies on a hillside while out horseriding, and galloped away in fear. It was not uncommon, in some neighbourhoods near the Morro, for children to use body parts as toys, or play football with the occasional skull.

As the world now knows, most of these remains belonged to the Chinchorro people. And in the last fifty years, scientists have come to appreciate the importance of these graveyards, and the people of Arica have also come to embrace the Chinchorro, both as scientific artefacts and as markers of civic and regional identity.

This transformation is the result of a sustained effort by archaeologists and anthropologists at the University of Tarapaca. In 2023, the former Chinchorro settlements in the Arica and Parinacota region were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site - the culmination of a 20-year campaign led by Bernardo Arriaza, the anthropologist Vivien Standen and their team at the university. In citing the Chinchorro as objects of ‘outstanding universal value’, UNESCO paid tribute to the people who ‘successfully adapted to the extreme environmental conditions of a hyper-arid coastal desert’ and whose ‘archaeological sites…are recognized for having the oldest known artificially mummified human bodies.’

Having brought this heritage to the attention of the wider world, Arriaza and his team were obliged to ensure that these sites were protected, and they recognised that this objective could not be achieved without the active participation of the wider public. As a result, they were obliged to look beyond the laboratory, and engage the population in a wider conversation about the Chinchorro sites and their scientific importance. This was not difficult for Arriaza, who is as likely to be found enthusiastically designing an education poster for children, or checking Chinchorro mummy replicas, as he is poring over mummified remains in the laboratory.

But the heritage designation required a wider team with different skills, spanning law, public education, tourism, and private enterprise, in order to protect the sites. One of the consequences of the UNESCO process was the Corporación Chinchorro Marka, a public-private body which carries out educational work on the Chinchorro heritage, and engages in outreach to schools, associations for the elderly and neighbourhood associations.

The Corpoation’s aim, according to the archaeologist Cesar Bories, is ‘to bring everybody to a certain base level of knowledge about Chinchorro culture so that they can work with a good, solid basis of information’ aimed at transforming ordinary members of the public into curators of the Chinchorro. At the Corporation’s offices in downtown Arica, Bories discussed the tensions between heritage preservation and the tourists that heritage status bring to the city. ‘It’s a big challenge to make this look interesting in terms of tourism,’ he said, ‘ because we don’t have Machu Pichu or the Pyramids, with their very distinctive architectural features. What we have are the Chinchorro mummies that are mostly in museums.’

In Arica, what Bories calls, ‘Jurassic Park’-style tourism cannot be achieved without damaging or destroying the Chinchorro sites, and his team have set out to inculcate a sense of public curatorship through workshops, field trips, and visits to schools, with an emphasis on Chinchorro culture as a ‘living culture’ made up of ‘living people not just a mummified culture because sometimes people think they were only dying and making mummies.’

In addition to carrying out interactive activities in which children are given little shovels to dig up replicas of human remains in sand boxes to show how archaeological sites work, the Corporation also works with entrepreneurs, Providing information to make accurate replicas in order to promote ‘a more respectful approach to Chinchorro culture.

Bories believes that Chinchorro have become ‘ a thing related to pride and identity here, because we are a coastal community. If you go to the beach everyday, from 7 am onwards you see fishermen, surfers and guys collecting on the shore, so it’s embedded in the lifestyle of the community here to have this close relationship with the coast and the Chinchorro were the first specialised hunter gatherers here.’

Art has been central to these outreach efforts. The University of Tarapacá has sought out local artists to make mummy replicas and paint and draw the Chinchorro, and there has been no shortage of applicants. I spoke to the sculptor Paola Pimentel and her graphic designer Johnny Vásquéz at their beautiful home near the Morro. The two of them had vivid childhood memories of their first encounter with the Chinchorro, when they regularly encountered human remains while playing with her friends on the slopes of the Morro, or in the tunnels laid for pipes during the construction of their neighbourhood.

Both of them, as Pimentel puts it, were ‘in contact with the Chinchorro culture without knowing anything about the culture or the scope of heritage,’ but the invitation from the university to make replicas opened up a new connection between art and science, and an artistic meeting across the centuries that Pimentel compares to falling in love.

Vásquéz recalled how moved he was by mummies that signified ‘the end of a people, who had the experience of living in a pristine place that was also in the middle of a desert.’ Pimentel described her admiration for the artistic sensibility of the Chinchorro mummies, in which ‘Each one is different, each one is different from another. There’s no single pattern that just gets repeated. Each body shows distinct forms of intervention. You can see in these bodies the subjectivity of whoever carried out the intervention.‘

Like Bories, Pimental and Vásquez believe that the population of Arica have begun to take pride in the city’s connection to the Chinchorro. I saw plenty of evidence of this myself. The Chinchorro are everywhere in Arica. You see their masks on wall murals, restaurant signs and on buses, and in almost every tourist brochure on the region. Taxi drivers will proudly boast that the Chinchorro were mummifying the dead before the Egyptians, as if they had a hand in it. At the foot of the Morro, the Colon 10 archaeological site where a would-be hotelier uncovered dozens of bodies in 2004, has been turned into a museum. Here, mummies that were too delicate to be removed lie two or three rows deep beneath a glass screen right in the middle of a residential neighbourhood.

One day I visited the Caleta de Camarones (the bay of Camarones) at the foot of the Camarones river, one of the key sites in the UNESCO designation. We drove out through the desert, along the Pan-American highway, past the ever-present animitas (shines) with which Chileans honour the prematurely-departed. After nearly two hours we turned off a little road down to the bay, where we paused to admire Paola Pimentel’s imposing statues.

At the dried-up river mouth, we parked outside a little settlement made up of plank and plywood shacks. We hadn’t been there long when Jorge, the Corporation Chinchorro’s local guide came bounding out to meet us, and offered to show us the local Chinchorro sites. Jorge had been living in this isolated bay for thirty years, after he was run over and seriously injured at the age of thirteen. When doctors told his parents he needed to live in a more peaceful place, his parents brought him here.

In addition to running a local restaurant with his wife, he acts as a guide, curator and guardian of the Chinchorro heritage, and he takes these duties seriously. He has attended Bernardo Arriaza’s lectures, and he knows the area like the back of his hand. He showed us the place where some of the first mummies had been found, and took us onto the cliffs overlooking the sea, where the Chinchorro had once cooked, and climbed down to the rocks to collect mussels and shellfish. To my disbelief, Jorge showed us arrowheads, stratified shell middens and original Chinchorro stone pestles, lying around like the remnants of a recent picnic.

These were artefacts that would normally be in a museum, yet none of them had been stolen, and Jorge was on hand to see that no one tried to steal them. All these relics, he told us proudly, were part of the Chinchorro heritage, and if people wanted to see them, he was there to show them where they could be found. At one point, he covered an arrowhead with dirt, just in case, while making sure that he knew where to find it.

I was almost as impressed by him as I was by the place, as he casually told us that a piece of clothing was probably Tiwanaku, and pointed out the remains of an Inca settlement on the other side of the river.

But what impressed me most, were the people who had once lived in this remote wild place, and made it their home for thousands of years. I imagined them, running down the slopes, tripping and injuring themselves and acquiring the injuries that have been found on so many adult bodies. I imagined them sitting round the remains where we stood, talking, laughing, chanting and maybe singing.

The poet Octavio Paz once wrote: ‘For the first time in history, we are contemporaries of all mankind.’ It’s an attractive proposition, but it’s not strictly accurate. As far as the past is concerned, we can never be contemporaries. We can never fully understand what it was like to live in a place like the Caleta de Camerones 7,000 years ago. All we can do is pore over their remains, and use science, art and the imagination to piece together some fragments of their lives and beliefs.

This is not an academic exercise. It is worth the effort. Because even though we can never the ‘contemporaries’ of the Chinchorro, we can be sympathetic observers. We can recognise that they, like us, did not want to die or say goodbye to the people they loved. We can understand that they, like us, were mystified by why these things happened, and that they, like us, wanted the future to remember them.

And now thousands of years later, in ways that they could not possibly have imagined, the former inhabitants of this wild lonely bay are remembered. The people who lived with their ancestors close at hand have become the ancestors of the people of Arica, and the city of the dead has become part of the city of the living.