Mummies

The boy found in Salta

As a child I was fascinated by Discovery channel. I would watch it every night with my dad till it was my bed time. I loved to learn about anything that scientists were excited about. I remember watching a special about Incan mummies. The Incans would sacrifice children and bury them on high peaks in the Andes. When archeologists found them, they were preserved very well. In some cases the mummies were preserved so well that they had all of their skin, hair, and clothing intact. They were preserved so well because they had been frozen for centuries. Never did it cross my mind that I would encounter one of these mummies. But as we began our tour in Salta over the weekend we visited the museum where the three children considered the world’s best preserved mummies are kept on display. We had a very interesting tour guide tell us about why the children were sacrificed. Apparently, as a unifying ceremony for many regions of the Incan empire. We learned about the things they were buried with, shoes, clothing, statues. We learned that they had been buried alive but had felt no pain because they were highly intoxicated. It was all very interesting to me at first, but then we saw the boy mummy. They only keep one child on display at a time. I remembered right away that of all things to see in a museum mummies were my least favorite. The little boy was crouching in a fetal position, his eyes were closed and he just looked like he was sleeping. Though he looked only seven years old he was really over five hundred. I felt bad for him. He had been used a sacrifice to the gods and remained frozen on a mountain for five hundred years and know I was looking at him as if he were any other artifact. I knew I wouldn’t like someone to unbury me and put me on display. But I think this instance speaks a lot to the themes we have been discussing. People, places and cultures, are not accessible just for our enjoyment or intrigue. Looking to De Botton, I wonder what I had been “shown” by seeing these artifacts and learning this piece of history. I think that more anything I saw that every culture was being overtaking by another. These children were sacrificed to help unify an Incan empire that would be later be destroyed by a Spanish one which would later be destroyed by a PanAmerican agenda, which would later be infiltrated by tourists like me. I wonder what I would’ve thought about the region without knowing what had come before? Would I look at the people who were clearly indigenous and speak Spanish. Yes, this was a natural history museum and it had no artistic agenda, but what was being shown? The brutality of the Incans whose blood still ran in the people here? Did it show the intelligence, the power of a people that were destroyed by a European power? Was it glorifying what came before? What did this museum highlight and leave out about the Incan/Argentine culture? I’m still not sure.