Science: Fancy Wrapping

About the time of Christ, he died in a valley near Pisco,* on the coast of southern Peru. He was probably a high priest or a chieftain because his honored body had been carefully wrapped in layers & layers of cloth and buried far out on a barren desert. As the centuries passed, his people were killed or dispersed and all memory of them vanished. Last week his mummy, unwrapped with loving care at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, showed what an odd and gorgeous culture had flowered in a desert-ringed Peruvian valley 20 centuries ago.

The mummy, one of 400 discovered in the dry soil of the Paracas Peninsula, did not look like much. It was a pumpkin-shaped bundle of coarse brown cloth some 5 ft. in diameter. No one could tell what was in it. Other such likely-looking mummy bundles have turned out to contain beans.

Bright Turban. Dr. Rebeca Carrion Cachot of the Peruvian National Museum of Archeology and Anthropology and Junius Bird of the American Museum loosened the ropes that tied the top of the bundle. The outer cloths, nearly as strong as new, peeled away easily. Inside were finer cloths, and perched on the top was a turban of red embroidery.

Gingerly, the two archeologists lifted the turban off. Beneath it, stuffed into the bundle like wash into a laundry bag, were some of the gaudiest garments, shirts, kilts and shawls, ever worn by man. Most of them were made of embroidery so delicate that the tiny stitches covering all the cloth looked like meshes of the finest weaving. Across them pranced birds and wildcats in reds, pinks, greens and yellows almost as fresh and brilliant as when they came from the dye vats. From their edges dripped cataracts of brightly colored fringe; the shirts had masses of fringe instead of sleeves. In life, the man who wore them must have delighted the eyes of his barbaric gods.

Long Cloth. Out of the inexhaustible bundle came a striped cloth 12 ft wide and 87 ft. long. Bird believes that this is the biggest cloth ever woven by pre-machine methods. He estimates that the weavers must have walked 77 miles while laying out the warp threads.

In the bottom of the bundle, crushed under the burden of his gorgeous vestments, was the dry skeleton of what had once been a middle-aged Peruvian with greying hair. Amid all those glowing colors, he looked small and inconsequential. The diggers, fascinated by the era in which he lived, were not much interested in the man himself. Only one thing about him was worth noting: his legs were tightly folded under his chin because the ancient Peruvians believed that a man should lie m his grave in the position in which he lay in his mother’s womb.

* The port after which the famous Peruvian brandy was named.