Archeologists in Peru have discovered a 15-century-old mummy of a tattooed Moche woman entombed with a dazzling collection of weapons and jewelry.
The woman, clearly a member of royalty, was buried with a sacrificed teenage slave at her feet and surrounded by multiple signs of femininity, including precious jewelry, golden needles and bejeweled spindles and spindle whorls for spinning cotton.
But her burial bundle also contained gilded copper-clad war clubs and finely crafted spear throwers – objects never seen in a Moche woman’s tomb.
“Why would a woman be accompanied by weapons?” asked archeologist John Verano of Tulane University, who reported the find in the June issue of National Geographic magazine.
Given the quantity and unusual preservation of the artifacts, he added, “it is going to take archeologists years of work to try and unravel the mystery.” University of California, Los Angeles, archeologist Christopher Donnan, who has been working for years in the nearby Jequetepeque Valley, said many of the burial goods are identical to royal artifacts he has discovered there.
“There are implications of contact between royalty in two different valleys,” he said.
“We’ve never been able to recognize something like that before.”
The find suggests that the Moche, like other South American cultures, cemented alliances between cities through intermarriage.
The mummy was discovered on the Peruvian coast about 300 miles north of the Lima. The site was occupied by a variety of groups from about 2500 B.C. through the Spanish colonial period, when it was abandoned.
The Moche flourished there from about A.D. 100 to 700.
The mummy, which dates to about A.D. 450, was placed on a covered patio that was subsequently buried under 15 feet or so of adobe bricks, which protected it from the weather and looters.
