Hipolito Tica had saved for decades to finally build himself a proper house in a working class neighborhood in Lima. His problem was what to do about “the neighbors” — as he called the centuries-old mummies buried below.
The mechanic had known they were there since the day in 1996 when he tried to dig a latrine on the lot, which is a few meters from the El Sauce archeological site on the eastern edge of the Peruvian capital.
Taking a break from hefting bricks, Tica said that he had been working to loosen the earth with a metal rod when the ground suddenly began to collapse.
Photo: AP
“I got out of there fast as a spider,” he said.
Tica found a flashlight and checked the hole that had opened at his feet, about 5m deep and 3m wide.
“I saw some bundles — the light was bright enough; they were funerary bundles,” he said.
He was not sure what to do, who to tell.
Like about 500,000 other people around the edges of Lima, he had just moved in, building a rudimentary adobe structure on the unoccupied lot without owning a title. So drawing the attention of authorities to an archeological find could cost him a home.
In spite of that, he said he broached word of the discovery to some archeologists who were excavating Incan ceramics from nearby streets where the city was installing water lines. He said they did not pay much attention. He did not press the issue.
So he decided to just coexist with “the neighbors.” He covered the hole with an old door, a carpet he pulled out of an old car and a layer of dirt.
“Nobody noticed the hole,” he said.
As the years passed, Tica and his neighbors gradually won rights to the property in their new neighborhood. He planned to build a house of brick and cement, and along with neighbors applied for water and sewage service — which required approval from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture and a local museum to ensure that they would not harm archeological remains.
There Tica, who had little formal schooling, began to learn about the Incas and other early Peruvian civilizations.
Building the house correctly would mean laying a foundation and filling in the hole where the bodies were buried.
“I was worried,” he said.
Friends told him to “just cover it, fill it with cement and you’re ready.”
However, he said that he “had a nagging worry that people in the future wouldn’t know anything about this area. Part of history is here.”
So he looked up an archeologist, Julio Abanto of the Ruricancho Cultural Institute, who was doing research in the area, and told him: “I have a burial and I want you to see it.”
Abanto and his team obtained government permission for an emergency dig.
The archeologist lowered himself into the hole with ropes and found three bundles, each of which contained more than one set of remains — it is not yet clear how many — belonging to a culture within the Incan empire more than 500 years ago.
One of the skeletons has a sort of crown, bits of copper and a silver bracelet, as well as a spoon-like implement used for coca leaf with an image of a bird pecking at the head of a fish. There were also shells of a sort of mollusk prized in the region.
Archeologists are still studying the finds, but Abanto said that they likely belonged to members of a local elite who had been conquered by the Incans.
Now the bricklayers helping Tica build the house chew coca leaf as they work — a common practice in the region — and sometimes bury a few leaves at the now filled-in burial site.
“In our city, it’s possible in these most casual ways to find surprising heritage that helps us reconstruct our local history,” Abanto said.
In this case, it was “a 21st century family living above another from 500 years ago.”
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