The Pyramids Valley of Peru reveals its Inca past with the discovery of 24 burials

The Inca empire, the largest of pre-Hispanic America, has come to dominate much of the present territory of Peru without hardly knowing its presence in the majestic Pyramids Valley, until 39, now under these millenary buildings, 24 funerals of the Inca nobility have been found

The discovery presented Wednesday by a group of archaeologists from the Ministry of Culture confirm that the Incas attach great value to the pyramids of Tucume, the largest architectural complex of this type in ancient Peru, with 26 pyramidal buildings on an area of ​​221 hectares, including the largest in South America. 19659005] With a height equivalent to the Maya temple of Kukulkán, in Chichen Itzá (Mexico), the pyramids of Túcume may seem in the eyes of the visitor a sand hill with a Squebrajada by the pbadage of centuries, since they have was erected a thousand years ago with adobe instead of stone, long before the Incas came to these lands around the year 1470.

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However, beneath these layers of dust and earth is the greatest architectural representative of the Sicán or Lambayeque civilization, one of the most important on the northern coast of Peru, which was later conquered by the Chimu, and these A little later, the Incas

both continued to confer on the monumental complex the same ceremonial role that their creators gave it, like the Inca tombs that appear in the huaca (temple) Las Abejas, l & # 39; one of the 26 complex, thanks to the excavations conducted by the Execution Unit 005 Naylamp of the Ministry of Culture

"We have all the evidence that it is a group d & # 39; Elite, where there are men and women, "she explained. Director of the Túcume Museum, Bernarda Delgado

She says this because all the individuals were buried next to the ceramics and wrapped in fine fabrics, objects that are not usually found in the burials of the people.

Some ceramics they are almost intact and allow to observe in detail the pottery of Tucume, a fusion of lambaya and chimu art, with characteristic jars to carry in their beaks representations of heads, either Of men, either animals like the bat

have not yet determined the kind of each individual, intuit that women are the ones who have tools to weave and the men who are accompanied by oars or long wooden paddles and shells of spondylus, mollusk so much appreciated by the Incas that the gold itself

"Three or four of them, which seem to have a higher hierarchy, are wrapped in bundles, that is to say that they have between 20 or 25 tissues, or even sometimes up to 30, which envelop the character, "says Delgado

Among these there is one that is particularly striking for having more tissues than the aut res, a package so sumptuous that it recalls the only precedent of the Inca burial discovered in the pyramids of Túcume, corresponding to the last Inca governor of this region.

"The most curious is that one of these fabrics has the characteristics of the current quilts, with a native cotton," says archaeologist Jose Manuel Escudero, director of

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Once they manage to unpack it and submit it to more tests in the lab, they can determine if it was contemporary of the last Inca governor, found in 1991, or where he was before that.

Another unknown who is not yet clear are the reasons that led to these noble Incas. be buried in this huaca, located in the southwest of the Pyramids Valley, separated from one kilometer of the main building, the Huaca Larga, the largest in South America, 30 meters high and 700 meters wide , where the last Inca ruler With 89 people working in the field, archaeologists believe that they can still find more Inca burials in this cultural cradle of ancient Peru, since they have at least two four seasons of excavations planned in the project that finances the Ministry of Culture with 8.3 million soles (about 2.5 million dollars).