The Chinchorro mummies

Fishing people on the desert coast of northern Chile and southern Peru made mummies of their dead about two thousand years before the Egyptians did, taking the bodies apart and rebuilding them.

Date: About 5000 to 1700 BCIII · Farming and the New Stone AgeIV · First cities and the Bronze Age
Place: Arica, Chile · Camarones, ChileThe Americas
Laid out as: A siteOne place known mainly from digging, read layer by layer from the top down.
Lessons: 4 planned, none written yet
Themes: Religion, belief and myth
Medicine, health and disease
Peoples, cultures and civilisations

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

IFishers of the Atacama
IIMaking a mummy
IIIChildren first
IVSaving the mummies today

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Max Uhle
Bernardo Arriaza

Objects

Black and red mummies
Fish hooks of shell and cactus spine

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

5000 BC to 1700 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

Caral and the first cities of the Andes outline
The Mesoamerican ballgame outline
The Olmecs outline

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?