Paracas culture

The Paracas Peninsula, located 200 km south of Lima, divides the coast of Peru into two roughly equal parts. Paracas culture was discovered unexpectedly. This discovery was made on this desert peninsula.

Paracas culture was discovered unexpectedly

In 1925 an expedition led by Julio Cesar Tello began to work here. Caesar's attention was drawn to the "cavernas" - the mysterious caves, where from time to time the local people would visit. Beginning to study the "cavernas", Tello was shocked: it was not a chain of natural grottoes, as was supposed at first, but a whole system of underground chambers carved into a coastal rock at a depth of about eight meters. Each of the chambers was connected to the surface by a narrow outlet. And in each such chamber there were dozens of mummies of people both sexes and all ages, wrapped in bright matter. The safety of the fabrics was simply incredible - they not only did not decay, but preserved both the texture and brightness of the colors.

What kind of people buried their dead on this desert peninsula? After the death of Tello, this culture was called the culture of Paracas. Today, Paracas cultural monuments are known in several versions. Some of them are found not on the coast, but in the mountain valleys of Central and Southern Peru. Numerous evidences prove that the Paracas culture developed directly from the Chavin de Huantar civilization, and finds about the most ancient period of the Paracas culture are particularly clear. The only difference was that here, on the southern coast of Peru, lived easier and did not build monumental temples.

The cemetery of another type of Paracas culture, discovered by Tello on the Paracas Peninsula, was named Necropolis. Approximately it dates from the 3rd-4th centuries BC. The mummies (numbering more than 400) were in underground tombs made of stone and unfired bricks. Above each tomb was a courtyard with a fireplace, where, possibly, mummification of bodies before burial was performed.

In each of the tombs archaeologists have found a lot of various objects - in some cases their number reaches up to one and a half hundred. These are clothes, ornaments, weapons, stone axes, vessels, tools, ornaments, headgear, capes from wool of lamas and much more. Many mummies have gold ornaments - they were inserted in the ears, nostrils, mouth, twisted around the neck or lay on the chest.

Fabrics of Paracas culture are struck not only by their sizes and exquisite combinations of colors, but also by the fact that after 1500 years they have not lost either elasticity or brightness of colors. It seems that these fabrics only recently left the hands of weavers. They are woven from a wool of five or six colors and painted with magnificent multicolored ornaments - stylized images of birds, animals, fish, anthropomorphic figures and strange monsters, as well as geometric patterns. The dyers of the Paracas culture were able to produce remarkable brightness colors - especially blue, green, yellow and brown.

However, no less attention than fabrics deserve and found the mummies of the Paracas culture. At their research it was found out that at the absolute majority of them the skulls are artificially deformed, and many skulls bear traces of trepanation that was perfect even during life. Studies have made it possible to conclude that the trephined skulls are the result of a surgical intervention, apparently performed in some ritualistic-magical purposes. Holes in the turtles, pierced during these religious rituals, the Indian surgeons covered with gold plates.

The mummies of Paracas culture have puzzled scientists and another puzzle: where did they come from? The fact is that in the vicinity of the Paracas peninsula there are no traces of human settlements, and the specialists still do not know exactly where the dead came from. Perhaps the Paracas necropolis was something like a "pantheon" - people who occupied the upper levels of the hierarchical ladder-the priests and representatives of the tribal nobility-were buried here?

It is believed that the culture of Paracas has become the main transmission link of civilizational impulses from chavina to later cultures of the lake basin Titicaca - for example tiauanako. Here, however, a problem arises: it turns out that in the coastal culture of Paracas there are some features that are characteristic for both chavin and tiuanako. But how could this happen if we consider that it was Paracas culture that served as a transmission link for them?

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