Laguna de las Momias

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The Laguna de las Momias (Mummies' lagoon) also known as Laguna de los Cóndores (Condors Lagoon) is located in Leimebamba, Amazonas Region, Peru.

In the middle of the cloak of dense tropical vegetation that covers the wrinkled skirts of the oriental flank of the Andean mountain range or Amazon Andes, there where the man never went so far as to settle, farmhands of the stockbreeder Ullilén, of Leimebamba, in the department of the Amazon, sighted by chance to beginnings of 1997, a group of mausoleums preincaicos, ignoring that these valuable funeral constructions were keeping jealously in his interior a real archaeological miracle.

After the archaeologist Federico Kauffmann Doig took knowledge of this forgotten necropolis, thanks to news spread by the antropólogio and journalist Álvaro Rocha, he proceeded to organize immediately an expedition.

Towards that solitary place Kauffmann Doig moved in May, 1997 with the first expedition that was provided with professional archaeologists, after the examination carried out by officials of the National Institute of Culture with head office in the city of Chachapoyas. The expedition was led by Kauffmann and it was provided with the patronage of the Government of Peru across PROMPERÚ

Of Leimebamba, door of entry to the place of the mausoleums, there is a distance that is covered at approximately 15 hours, the first half of which it can do to loin of mules. From now on, the route becomes painful for the dangerous marshes and the dense tropical forest that they must be gone along on foot along a territory of virgin forest, abandoned by the man.

Surrounded with a sepulchral silence, the mausoleums occupy a natural cave of very difficult access, sculpted in the wall of a craggy rock that emerges of a lagoon, without name in the geographical letters, today baptized as Lagoon of the Mummies. It is a question of cubicles that imitate housings constructed by the ancient chachapoyas to give grave to his illustrious deceased.

The mausoleums of the Lagoon of the Mummies were still replete with funeral bundles, sumandoéstos approximately two hundreds. Only a small part had been removed by the farmhands of Ullilén, which, on not having found the longed gold, interrupted his action depredadora. For the same, the presenta find was representing an authentic archaeological miracle.

The recommendations entragadas in writing for Federico Kaufmann Doig to the National Institute of Culture so that only few mummies were withdrawn from his mausoleums with ends of study, and that the others were staying in his original emplacement, properly protected, they were ignored. These funeral bundles ended, all of them, being withdrawn from his mausoleums. Moved in donkeys and mules to Leimebamba, at present they are deposited in the Museum of Place of the locality.

In the mausoleums personages were buried chachapoyas of high hierarchy and, in some cases, his shoots died to early age. During the domain incaico of the region, also they it were officials cusqueños that were residing in Cochabamba, to a day of the Lagoon of the mummies., following ancient traditions of the chachapoyas. The funeral buckets that integrate the mausoleums are shaped by only three walls, since the later side is the rock that it does the times of wall. It rises for approximately six meters and they present two levels or flats. In every bucket an about thirty of funeral bundles was piled up, on a species of scaffold.

The top flat of every mausoleum presents a window with jambs, lintel and threshold constructed with big flat monoliths. The windows present a light trapezoidal inclination and they took the renewal of the air as a function, to prevent the funeral bundles and the mummies from ending up disintegrating for effect of the high grade of the environmental moisture.

Six add the mausoleums that shape the Group 1 of the lagoon of the mummies. Prepared with compared masonry, his exterior walls were covered with a clayish rendered pasta of white color, which then was colored with red bands in some stretches.

The walls are decorated by frets that form symbolic motives, in whose achievement there have been used the same constitutive stones of the wall. It is a question of an emblem in the shape of "M" comtinuadas and extended horizontally. Frequently repeated in the architecture Chachapoyas, we interpret this motive as a symbol ornitomorfo linked with the special worship that was yielding in the magic religious Andean world to the birds of prey.

The funeral bundle is constituted by a mummy in seated position, wrapped in both flat and decorated textiles. A white cloth that is sewed in his ends and held with ropes, wraps exteriormente the funeral bundle. On this one surface is in some cases re-treated a human, ready-to-wear face madiante backstitches of hiki thickness. The process of mummification should have used sophisticated skills, judging by the excellent obtained results, which truly are in end difficult to achieve due to the high grade of moisture that he reigns in the region.

It is necessary to mention that several dozens of groups of mausoleums, similar to those of the Lagoon of the Mummies, were identified and studied in territory of the ancient chachapoyas from 1980, in fifteen of the expeditions Antihis executed by the Institute of Archaeology of the Amazonía and the Center Studi Ricerche Ligabue of Venice (Italy), which were led by Federico Kauffmann Doig and the anthropologist Giancarlo Ligabue. But with the exception of those of the Lagoon of the Mummies, all the mausoleums recognized till then by the expeditions Antihis they had been emptied of his funeral content, leaving in some places only residues.

These acts depredatorios began with the missionary fervor opened in the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, which ended in a hunt of mummies destined to extirpate the aftertastes of idolatry. Already in ours time, the mausoleums still not violentados ended up being robbed for profanadores interested in appropriating of the objects of value that would have been a part of the funeral trousseau of the personages of high status, there buried.