Mummified impeccably on an icy Andean mountain top, the remains of an adolescent Inca girl captured the attention of people all over the world in 1995, when news of her recovery became known. Yet Peruvian mummies have been the object of anthropological and historical interest for more than four centuries. In 1560, long before Egyptian pharaohs were put on public display in Cairo's Museum of Archaeology, curious Europeans had already been queuing up in Lima's San Andrés Hospital to view several of the marvelously preserved mummies of Peru's legendary Inca kings (Acosta [1590, bk. V, chap. VI] 1954:146; Riva-Aguero 1966:397). Struck by what seemed to them an idolatrous but fascinating custom, the early Spanish chroniclers of Andean culture noted that the practice of mummifying principal lineage heads and local chiefs was widespread in western South America.

Today, studies of pre-Hispanic mortuary practices draw heavily on these richly detailed ethnohistorical accounts, as well as on the wealth of cultural and biologic materials preserved in the arid coastal zone of Peru. Here, despite the absence of written history until the arrival of Pizarro in 1531, the archaeological record of mummification, stated as 6000 years old in the first edition of this volume, has now been extended back another 3000 years.

The origins of this practice remain unclear; naturally mummified bodies occur in Peruvian graves from before Andean societies became sedentary and stratified.