561: “Silent, but so much to tell.” The mystery of Colombia’s Mummies

In today’s episode, Emily Hart speaks to archaeologist Daniella Betancourt: the woman decoding the enigma of Colombia’s mummies.

Mummification is a practice which has been carried out all over the world, from Chile to China – from the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to Vladimir Lenin and Evita Perón, and - though chronically understudied - right here in Colombia too.

These preserved remains are, Daniella tells us, a perfect time capsule: bodies frozen in time, they give us all sorts of clues about the ways people lived, and their beliefs about life and death.

With the National University of Colombia, Daniella has been studying a collection of 36 mummies found in various institutions, trying to work out who they were, who mummified them, when - and why.

Because until now, there has been so little study of this practice in Colombia, there’s still an awful lot find out, not least because these mummies were created by indigenous communities whose histories and customs were interrupted and erased by the Spanish colonisation of the country: many of Colombia’s mummies were destroyed and even burnt.

But there is evidence that indigenous groups in Colombia kept practicing ritual mummification long after the arrival of the Spanish – perhaps a high-stakes act of cultural resistance, a spiritual imperative, or an attempt to create talismans of power – at this point, we can only guess – what the study has revealed, however, is that mummification was practiced much more widely than was previously thought – by more groups and in more regions of Colombia.

Though in the historical chronicles of the Spanish invasion and early colonial period, there are some descriptions of mummies, most of the contextual information has been lost – in fact we don’t even know where most of these mummies came from or how they were found, as their burial sites were desecrated by tomb raiders and looters who took anything of value and sometimes even displaced the remains themselves. However, the new study by Daniella and the team has shed new light on these Mummies, able to reach amazing conclusions about diet, geography, and even health from state-of-the-art scientific methods.

However, as Daniella will tell us, some of the results actually pose more questions than they answer – we’ll be talking in particular about a mummified two-year-old girl, who surprised Daniella even after years of studying her, and whose strange condition continues to confound researchers. We’ll also be discussing the ethics of studying human remains, and of displaying them in museums.

The headlines for this week are also reported by Emily Hart.