Almost everything known about how the Chimú buried their powerful had come from the wrong direction — from platforms emptied centuries ago, from private collections, from museum cases with no record of where the objects had lain or beside whom. Spanish colonial paperwork even preserves an inventory of one looted Chan Chan tomb, tallying gold worth 80,000 pesos. Context had been stripped away along with the metal.
Here the context survived. Thirty-eight individuals with complete skeletons. Metal weapons, copper and gold, jewellery, textiles that have kept their colour. About 200 black ceramic vessels marked with red pigment. And on several of the remains, a distinctive red colouring that the team suspects may be cinnabar — the mercury sulfide identified on the Lady of Cao, the Moche noblewoman excavated some 60 kilometres up the coast. Cinnabar has no coastal source in Peru. The nearest deposit lies at Huancavelica, more than 600 kilometres away across the highlands.
The principal figure is the puzzle. Laid fully extended rather than flexed or seated, with bones showing disturbance after burial. Meneses reads it the way an Andeanist would: these were people who moved their mummies, who brought the dead out, carried them, returned them. Somebody came back into this chamber.
Gabriel Prieto of the University of Florida, who dug the sacrificial ground at Huanchaquito-Las Llamas in the same valley, called it the discovery of the decade — the first time anyone has been able to look at an elite Chimú burial as its makers arranged it.
Utzh An is the largest of the ten walled citadels, known through most of the last century as Gran Chimú until the Ministry of Culture restored the Quingnam names. Quingnam itself is gone; no one has spoken it for centuries. Chan Chan has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1986 and on the List of World Heritage in Danger since the same year. The threat is rain. El Niño dissolves adobe.
Which is why the laboratory work is set to finish before the rains come in November.