THE MERE MENTION OF A new mummy discovery has a tendency to set editors’ pulses racing. And the more extraordinary a mummy is, the more concerted the barrage of reporters becomes. In the late fall of 1922, for example, an obscure English Egyptologist pulled off one of the most glorious mummy discoveries of modern times: the finding of the boy king Tutankhamen. Howard Carter had roamed desert ruins along the Nile for thirty-one years, working side by side with some of the greatest excavators of his day. He knew, as one writer put it, “almost every yard of sand in the Valley of the Kings.” But Carter was little prepared for the press storm that overtook him when he announced that he had found the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamen. Almost overnight, Carter found himself in the kind of limelight generally reserved for heads of state and Hollywood leading ladies; he and his colleagues were almost blinded by the glare. “No power on earth could shelter us from the light of publicity that beat down upon us,” he lamented shortly after. “We were helpless and had to make the best of it.”
This was no easy matter, for a mob of reporters and photographers laid seige to the excavations. Dressed in straw boaters, Harris tweeds, rumpled white shirts, and loosened ties, they hovered each day like crows on the high exterior wall above the tomb, waiting for the slightest glimpse of the newly famous Egyptologist and the tomb he worked upon. They were hungry for news that would satisfy their readers back home and they tried their best to charm Carter, an abrupt, irascible man who proved little susceptible to their wiles. When all their blandishments failed, they resorted to pure hounding. Finally, an exasperated Lord Carnarvon, the patron whose deep pockets funded the dig, attempted to chase them all off by signing away exclusive rights to the story to the London Times.
That did not put an end to the media bombardment, however. Letters flowed in from film companies offering huge sums of money. And determined reporters continued hunting down any shadow of a rumor about the excavation and Tutankhamen. One of the most creative journalistic minds belonged to Arthur Wiegall, a former inspector of antiquities at Thebes. Wiegall had inveigled his way into a job as a correspondent for London’s Daily Mail on the strength of his Egyptological connections. He naively expected preferential treatment, but Carter was not one to play favorites. The gruff Egyptologist scorned all members of the press pretty much equally. So Weigall was forced to improvise. Denied access to real news from the dig, he fed his editors a torrent of wild tales that considerably embellished the myth of the mummy’s curse.
It was Wiegall, for example, who broke the story of Carter’s ill-fated golden canary. Carter had brought the bird as a pet to Egypt and his Egyptian crew, who had never seen such a bird before, quickly adopted it as a mascot and a token of good luck. But luck, as it turned out, really wasn’t on the canary’s side. After Carter opened Tutankhamen’s tomb, a wandering cobra insinuated its way through the bars of the bird’s cage and devoured the unfortunate creature. In Weigall’s dispatch, this bit of reptilian stealth was drenched in mystical significance. Weigall couldn’t resist pointing out to his readers that the cobra was the same species as the golden snake that writhed across Tutanhkamen’s mummy mask.
Carter made a point of ignoring such lurid tales. The mummy’s curse, after all, was a media invention, fabricated from a series of coincidences. Carter himself lived on for sixteen years after he opened the boy king’s tomb, scornful of such fictions to the end. “All sane people should dismiss such inventions with contempt,” he once snapped. Instead, he dedicated himself to the preservation of Tutankhamen’s tomb and all its contents. With a handful of researchers—chemists, anatomists, and others—he recorded its treasures and slowly unwrapped the mummy of the boy king. Carter was desperately curious about the cause of the young man’s death, but despite a careful examination, the team was unable to hazard a guess. So Carter respectfully returned the young pharoah to his coffin and laid him to rest once again in the Valley of the Kings.
Carter refused to compromise science. He brilliantly preserved Tutankhamen’s many treasures, and for this Egyptologists are exceedingly grateful. But Carter stuck to a difficult path in his work. Few modern mummy discoverers are able to remain so magisterially aloof from the press, perhaps because there are so few archaeological patrons like Lord Carnarvon around today to fund their work. Indeed a kind of strange symbiosis has arisen in recent years between the modern media and some mummy experts, and this has raised difficult questions about the role of the media in modern mummy science and the transformation of the preserved dead into public figures.
AT 22,110 FEET, Mount Llullaillaco is one of South America’s highest mountains. It stands just 721 feet lower than Mount Aconcagua, the highest peak on the continent, and its summit is subject to wild buffeting winds and sudden blinding snowstorms. Rising straight out of the pebbled plains of the Atacama Desert in northern Argentina, Llullaillaco is not a place for casual travelers. Indeed, it is not always a place for seasoned climbers. In the spring of 1995, an American mountaineer vanished while attempting a solo ascent. When climbers from the Chilean military and local search and rescue teams set out to hunt for him, they had to abandon the pursuit before reaching the summit: the weather had closed in dangerously. Yet for all its perils, Llullaillaco holds a strange distinction. Atop its summit, four miles above sea level, lies a major Inca ruin, complete with stone walls. It is the world’s highest archaeological site, and in the spring of 1999, Johan Reinhard, a prominent American explorer, mounted an expedition to excavate it.
Among many other things, Reinhard is an Andean archaeologist and a highly respected one at that. He has won his greatest fame as the discoverer of the young Inca girl popularly known as Juanita, or the Ice Maiden, but he has exhumed many other such bodies from Andean mountains. In 1999, after nearly two decades of exploring South American slopes and three previous expeditions to Llullaillaco, Reinhard believed that at least one and possibly more Inca children lay buried on the peak of the towering mountain. He believed they would be dressed, as Juanita had been, in fine robes and entombed with all their perfectly preserved grave goods: exquisite Inca bowls; shawl pins; and tiny gold, silver, and shell figurines. He also suspected that these children would be unlike any other mummy he had ever found. Buried at 22,100 feet, they would be frozen, in all probability, never once having thawed from the moment of death. If that were the case, they would be the best preserved and most photogenic mummies ever recovered from the ancient world. Determined to find them, Reinhard teamed up with a young Argentinian archaeologist and called on his veteran team of Peruvian climbers and students. Then Reinhard raised enough money from the National Geographic Society to mount a major expedition to Llullaillaco in the spring of 1999.
He planned the ascent for March, hoping that the heavy snowstorms that generally shroud Llullaillaco earlier in the season would have vanished by then. In this, however, he was disappointed. Battered by bad weather, he spent the first four days of the expedition cocooned in his tent just two hundred feet beneath the summit, worrying that all his considerable efforts and planning were about to come to naught. But on day five, the morning clouds dissolved into a faded blue sky; to the east, white-dusted peaks could be seen stretching to the horizon. Reinhard and his team set out for the summit, trudging single file up the steep slope with ice axes in hand. At the top, Reinhard found an encouraging sign. The ruins of Llullaillaco had escaped the hard icy crust that forms on other peaks with repeated freezing and thawing. Llullaillaco wouldn’t require the kind of bone-wearying excavation that Reinhard had become accustommed to over the years. But that was not to say that the dig would be easy. Temperatures at the summit regularly plunged to 35 degrees Fahrenheit and the thin air contained just 40 percent of the oxygen it did at sea level. Such a threadbare supply of oxygen starved both the body and the brain. It produced nausea, brutal, skull-splitting headaches; quick fatigue, and poor judgment. It could also bring on potentially fatal pulmonary and cerebral edema. Llullaillaco’s peak was not a place for amateurs.
Reinhard and his team, however, were very experienced. After just a day and a half of digging, one of the Peruvians, Arcadio Mamani, turned up a frozen body. It was a boy of about eight sitting with his knees drawn to his chest. His face was buried in the folds of a frozen carmine-red tunic. Reinhard urged his team to press on. A second mummy, swaddled in cloth and entombed with a spectacular white-feather headdress, emerged just as he and a colleague were lifting the boy from his tomb. A few days later, the team encountered a third body, a young girl. Reinhard eased back the fabric from her face and shoulders. Lightning had singed her chest and charred her nose and mouth. Still, her face was exquisitely beautiful. Her cheeks were plump and full with baby fat, her lips soft and round. She looked, to Reinhard’s amazement, as if her eyes would flutter open at any moment.
Reinhard and his team carried all three bodies back to the Argentine city of Salta. There conservators went to work. They unwrapped the cloth draped about the head of the second body, gently pulling back the textile. Their patient work revealed a young teenaged girl, whose delicate oval face was still eerily lit by a golden, lifelike glow. Bits of green coca leaves clung to her upper lip. Her hair, plaited by someone’s loving hands five hundred years ago, glistened in the light. Reinhard was very pleased. The girl seemed immaculately well preserved, even down to her internal organs. According to the images from the CT scans, blood still welled in her heart, as well as in that of the other two children—something never seen before in the Inca mummies. “I doubt that more perfectly preserved mummies will ever be found,” Reinhard marveled in his subsequent National Geographic article.
Both the public and the press were thrilled by these discoveries. So, too, were many Andean archaeologists. Passages from the Spanish chronicles suggest that the children of Llullaillaco were sacrifices made by the Inca to their gods, but these texts include few details of the dramatic rites. Archaeologists were keen to find out who these children were and what had happened atop the mountain peaks. The children from Llullaillaco had much to tell them. “Johan’s been able to do something that no other archaeologist could have done,” praised Daniel Sandweiss, an Andean archaeologist at the University of Maine. “He’s accessed a set of data that the rest of us would never see, and it’s important data. It talks about important events in the Inca world.”
But not everyone was so impressed by Reinhard’s finds; indeed, some seasoned researchers shook their heads in puzzlement. Since 1995, they said, Reinhard had conducted an unprecedented mummy hunt in the high Andes. Financed in part by the National Geographic Society in Washington, he had hired local climbers and enlisted South American archaeologists to locate the once-sacred tombs of similar Inca children. In just four years, he had mounted nearly half a dozen expeditions, exhuming eighteen of these rare child mummies. But Reinhard’s record as a researcher and advocate of the preserved dead, said critics, left something to be desired. His first major discovery—dubbed Juanita in honor of Reinhard, whose first name is often translated in Spanish as Juan—is one of the most important mummy finds of the twentieth century. Yet scientific research on it had stumbled badly. Hastily given over to public display just eight months after her discovery, Juanita had produced relatively few published scientific studies. “Juanita,” said Sonia Guillén, a former member of Reinhard’s research team, “was a big fiasco in my opinion.”
Just what had gone wrong wasn’t immediately apparent, but some experts believed that Reinhard had inadvertently opened a Pandora’s box when he stumbled upon Juanita. The spectacular nature of this mummy find, they contended, fueled public fascination around the world, creating a vast hungry public market for news and photographs of the frozen Inca girl. The resulting media barrage turned Juanita into a public figure and triggered a bitter battle in Reinhard’s research team, as various interests competed for control of the find. In the end, said some critics, it was not the scientific team but National Geographic that made certain key decisions in the project and sparked an unprecedented mummy rush in the Andes.
After a career filled with accolades, Reinhard was stung by such criticism. In his home near Franklin, West Virginia, the anthropologist clearly felt maligned by all the mudslinging. A sturdy, big-boned man in his mid-fifties possessed of cool blue eyes, thinning silver hair, and a jutting lantern jaw that hinted—accurately, as it turned out—at a testy, combative nature, he was determined to set the record straight. The National Geographic Society, he explained, had never meddled in the project’s key decisions. Instead, the American media giant had supplied several critical things that the impoverished Peruvian government could not, including much-needed funds for mummy conservation in Peru. As for his own motives in mounting expeditions in search of other frozen Inca children, Reinhard maintained that they were simple and straightforward. Far from engaging in photo and film opportunities or a mummy rush, he had undertaken the climbs as rescue missions to scientifically excavate and preserve the mummies from grave robbers, who were eager to plunder silver and gold and who were willing to use dynamite to blast away the enveloping ice to get at it. “To me, you don’t show respect for these sites by leaving them for the looters,” he observed.
Reinhard, one of South America’s most experienced mountaineers, had seen ample evidence of such blasting and looting himself. For more than twenty years, he had been combing the slopes of the high Andes for traces of the Inca, ever since fellow climbers had invited him on their expeditions to South America in 1980. Reinhard was thirty-seven at the time. Possessed of a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Vienna, he had been living in Nepal, studying the remote forest tribes and pursuing his deep love of climbing. To pay the bills, he had conducted freelance anthropological research, made a few ethnographic films, and worked as a camp manager for the 1976 American expedition to Everest. But he was restless and very footloose. He had never married nor had he any children, so he happily signed on for the trip to South America.
In Santiago, he came across a booklet on several mysterious Inca structures that perched on lofty peaks throughout the Andes. As a climber and anthropologist, Reinhard was immediately intrigued. Andean archaeologists believed that these strange ruins were places where the Inca had worshipped the sun or sent signals to those in distant villages. Reinhard wasn’t so sure. “Not having gone through academic training in Andean archaeology or cultural anthropology, I just let my mind roam.” In the Himalayas, early tribes had worshipped mountains as protectors and it occurred to Reinhard that something similar could have taken place in the Andes. “But I never thought I’d be able to figure out why the Inca had been going up on those peaks.”
He is intrinsically drawn to mysteries, a trait that he inherited from his father, a postal department detective, and he loved the idea of investigating these enigmatic places on his own. As a high school student in New Lenox, Illinois, he had once saved up enough money from his summer jobs to head off to Brazil alone for a solitary adventure. There he had acquired a fascination for foreign cultures, a taste for scuba diving and other extreme sports, and a penchant for solitude, all of which became his trademarks in his later years. “From the age of sixteen, none of my friends could understand my way of thinking or my way of seeing things,” he said.
So, after reading the pamphlet on the mountaintop Inca ruins in Chile, he started to investigate. One afternoon, while returning from one of these forays, he encountered an old man with a string of donkeys. Reinhard struck up a conversation, describing the stone-walled ruins he had just visited. The old Chilean had never seen them himself: he and other local people avoided the mountaintops, for they were dangerous places. Still, he told Reinhard that in two weeks’ time people would be gathering for a ceremony to worship the peak the ruins were on. In the Andes, he explained, people believed that the mountains were gods who controlled the rains, the fertility of the fields, and the health of the llama and the alpaca herds. This belief was fundamental to Andean life. Reflecting later on what the old man had told him, Reinhard realized that South American archaeologists had overlooked this practice of mountain worship when they interpreted ancient sites in the Andes.
Reinhard set up a new base of operations in Peru and Bolivia. “I liked the idea that there was a lot to see and do and explore that didn’t seem well known.” For the next fifteen years, he doggedly scaled one Andean peak after another, often by himself, searching for Inca base camps and summit sites. In the process, according to one prominent alpine historian, he bagged more high altitude peaks in South America than any other known climber. Reinhard was in his glory. “What I wanted to kill was the attitude that archaeologists couldn’t do archaeology at altitude, because when I started in 1980 that was the prevailing attitude.”
He loved the freedom of the work, but it was also a dangerous time. For much of it, Peru was locked in a deadly civil war, with Maoist guerillas known as the Sendero Luminoso on one side, and the Peruvian army on the other. Between 1980 and 1990 alone, the combatants killed 17,000 people, Peruvians and foreigners alike. In the face of such hostilities, most North American and European archaeologists left for Chile and other safer countries, fearful for their own lives and those of their students. Reinhard, however, stayed. Traveling and working alone, he became adept at slipping in and out of Sendero regions quickly and quietly, without attracting attention. One friend from that era, American cultural anthropologist Gary Urton, recalled how Reinhard took a similar tack in his personal life. In Cuzco, “Johan would just appear and then he’d be there and then he was gone. And then you’d see him two years later.”
By all accounts, he lived a meager existence. He depended on odd jobs and others to help him get through the year financially. “I had a girlfriend,” he told me, “who had a free house, so I didn’t have to pay for housing—most of the year anyway.” On one occasion, the National Geographic Society kicked in with some grant money, as did a few other funding agencies. In 1987, Reinhard won a Rolex Award for his studies: it paid for three years of research. By such threadbare means, he found and mapped more than forty mountaintop ritual sites and published widely on this work, winning generous praise from several prominent Andean archaeologists. Helaine Silverman, a leading authority on the prehistoric Nazca people of South America, called his book on the Nazca lines “the most satisfying and simplest explanation” she had seen. Others were equally impressed. In 1992, Bolivia awarded Reinhard the Puma de Oro, its highest honor in the field of archaeology.
By his late forties, Reinhard had reached the top of his game. He had not only been accepted, but lauded by prominent Andean anthropologists and archaeologists. “He was interested in what the Inca were doing at high altitude, and nobody else worked on that,” said Gary Urton, “so for many years, he really made significant contributions.” Then, in 1995, this quiet existence came to an end with his discovery of a frozen Inca mummy on the slopes of Mount Ampato in Peru.
REINHARD HADN’T SET out to find mummies. He had seen two Inca children recovered by other climbers during his early visits to South American museums, but neither of these preserved bodies had made much of an impression. “I had no fascination with the mummies originally,” he recalled. In September 1995, however, he decided to climb Mount Ampato in Peru with a friend in order to photograph a neighboring volcano lofting an ashy plume hundreds of feet into the air. He wanted the images for his slide collection. On the day of the discovery, his climbing partner, Miguel Zarate, was temporarily walking ahead while Reinhard made some notes. Zarate spied a tuft of brilliant red against the ashy ice. It was a miniature feather headdress on a carved shell figurine from the Inca period. A few minutes’ search turned up two similar statuettes. Greatly excited by this, Reinhard and Zarate spread out to comb the region.
In a crater below, Zarate noticed a rough cloth sack. It occurred to both climbers that it could be a mummy bundle, but they immediately dismissed the notion: it seemed so improbable. When Zarate tried to lift it, they got an eerie surprise. The leathery face of an Inca girl gazed at them blankly. Reinhard decided then and there to carry her and the figurines down the mountain: it was, he knew, an extremely important find. The mummy weighed almost as much as a slender living girl, and this meant that she had frozen, like the famous Iceman of Europe, and not freeze-dried the way most of the other known Inca children had. After her tumble down the slope, her head had dried in the air, but her torso and limbs were still wrapped in protective layers of cloth, exquisitely preserved. This increased her scientific value enormously.
Traveling almost nonstop by foot, donkey, and bus, Reinhard and Zarate managed to tuck her into a freezer at the Catholic University in Arequipa two and a half days later. To their immense relief, ice still clung to her outer tunic. Word of the find spread quickly around the university. It seemed obvious to local archaeologists that the girl was one of the capacocha children. The capacocha was among the most sacred of all Inca rituals. According to the early Spanish writers, the Inca hoped that by giving up something as precious as human life, the gods would look more favorably on their prayers, letting loose the rains needed to water the valleys and green the fields, water being a scarce commodity in the Andes. The Inca also believed that a capacocha sacrifice could ward off pestilence or other natural calamity or bestow wisdom and good health on a new emperor, thereby bringing prosperity to the entire Inca empire.
By tradition, the Inca consigned only their finest possessions to their gods. For the capacocha, they chose their children. The victims, according to historical records, had to be healthy and perfectly formed, without a flaw to be seen anywhere on their bodies. In one account written in the 1570s, an Inca woman told the Spanish that she had been selected for sacrifice until somebody discovered a little blemish on her skin and set her aside. Often the child stood just at the threshold of adulthood, a bit younger than marriageable age. Reinhard believed that this was to ensure the purity and virginity of the human offering. But some other Andeanists questioned this, pointing out that the concept of virginity was not terribly important in traditional Andean culture. Instead, these anthropologists theorized that the Inca probably picked human beings who were at the height of their vital powers, possessed of all the joy and animal spirits of a young teenager.
Andean scholars agreed, however, that the ritual was one of immense importance to the Inca. In the fifteenth century, for example, a prominent lord from Cajatambo agreed to give his daughter, a girl “beautiful beyond exaggeration,” for the capacocha. He accompanied her first to the Inca capital of Cuzco in a procession so holy that local villagers hid away as it passed by their doors: anyone trying to stop it or hinder its progress was immediately put to death. In Cuzco, the Inca emperor awaited the arrival of the lord and his daughter and other similarly chosen children from elsewhere in the empire. Seated upon a golden throne in the city’s central square, the emperor greeted them solemnly and prayed to the sun, while priests distributed small cakes to the children. Long days of celebration and ceremony followed. When they finally ended, the lord brought his daughter home. By the time she stepped foot in her village, the girl was reconciled to her fate and gave a little speech. “Finish with me now,” she reportedly told her kin, “because the celebrations which they did for me in Cuzco are quite sufficient.” So the child was taken to a mountaintop visible for miles around. Someone dug a deep shaft there, lining it with ceramic pitchers and silver bowls. Then they lowered her into the grave and covered it over with stones. That was the last that the Inca saw of her.
Entombed in the mountain, the girl became a guardian spirit to her community. People trekked to her grave to ask her advice on important matters, and it was said that she spoke to them in the voices of the priests who attended her. Reinhard had little doubt that the slender Inca girl from Ampato had met a similar fate.
AFTER ASSURING HIMSELF that Juanita was safe and sound at the Catholic University, Reinhard began making urgent plans. He fully expected there were more frozen children and more Inca grave goods on Ampato and he was keen to rescue them: he worried that looters would destroy them once the story had broken. A major expedition to Ampato would require money, however, far more than Reinhard had at his disposal. So he called George Stuart at National Geographic. Stuart, the magazine’s staff archaeologist, had just become acting chair of the society’s powerful research and exploration committee. A rumpled, genteel southerner, Stuart has a passionate interest in the prehistory of Latin America. Indeed, his own son David is one of the world’s leading authorities on Mayan hieroglyphical writing. Listening to news from Arequipa, Stuart was captivated.
Reinhard also wanted to find experts to help preserve the body from deterioration. He asked Catholic University colleague Jose Antonio Chavez to contact Sonia Guillén, a prominent Peruvian physical anthropologist whom Reinhard had met over cocktails a few years earlier in Cuzco. Guillén was an expert on the mummies of Peru’s coastal desert. She was also the director of a major new mummy research facility, Centro Mallqui, near the Peruvian city of Ilo, and she had taken a strong interest in Reinhard’s research. Indeed, she had asked him to call her if he ever came across a capacocha child. Hearing of the new find, she readily agreed to help out. In Austria, studies of the famous Iceman were reaping a scientific windfall—new data on ancient European clothing, medicine, infectious diseases, diet, agriculture, and environments, thanks to the efforts of nearly 150 scientific consultants. Guillén hoped to do something similar. “The dream,” she recalls, “was that this would be possible with Juanita.”
From Washington, Stuart swiftly wired funds for the return expedition to Ampato. Stuart’s colleagues at the National Geographic Society began making arrangements for a photographer and film crew to cover the expedition. The timing of the discovery seemed particularly fortuitous, for the society was going through a rocky time. Competing for readers with the new Internet media and a host of specialist magazines, the society’s flagship magazine, National Geographic, had taken a severe beating in circulation. In just six years from 1989, it had lost nearly two million readers. To bolster the $463-million-a-year enterprise, society executives had recently created a for-profit arm that included its television operation. Intense coverage of a major new mummy discovery—a perennial favorite of readers and television viewers—could help boost the society’s fortunes.
With funding from Washington, Reinhard teamed up with Chavez and recruited sixteen climbers and archaeologists to assist in the excavations. Together, the expedition members headed off to Ampato, where they camped for three long weeks. At 19,200 feet, they found the tombs of two more Inca children, complete with a host of Inca artifacts—a scattering of figurines and finely painted plates and pots and an assortment of more mundane items, such as spoons, drinking vessels, and sandals. But to the disappointment of all, neither of the new bodies was as finely preserved as Juanita.
Back in Arequipa, Reinhard turned to the pressing problem of preserving Juanita. Already Guillén had called several prominent mummy experts for advice, including Art Aufderheide and two Austrian anthropologists, Konrad Spindler and Horst Seidler, who were leading the research on the Iceman. The consensus was that Juanita’s dried head had to be kept at a lower humidity than the rest of her body and her clothes. This would be a difficult feat, however, and Guillén could see no way of pulling it off in the simple facilities available at the Catholic University in Arequipa. “There was no infrastructure [there],” she recalled, “not even the idea of how to do research with any type of body.”
So the discussions dragged on, as the team wrestled with the problem. Reinhard found these meetings difficult to sit through. His colleague and close friend, Jose Chavez, the dean of archaeology at Catholic University, was growing increasingly irritated with Guillén. Chavez suspected that Guillén was quietly pursuing her own agenda, for she maintained that the best place to keep and study Juanita was in her own mummy research facility in Ilo. But these assertions grated at Chavez. He hoped that Juanita would bring funding for a new conservation lab in Arequipa, creating another mummy-research center. Reinhard was uncomfortable with the increasingly heated bickering. A solitary man, he had great difficulty in keeping the team running smoothly.
Further adding to tension was the mounting media frenzy. The Austrians arrived in Peru with a German television crew from Spiegel-TV; they wanted to film their own documentary on Juanita. Meanwhile, the Peruvian press had begun clamoring for news on the find, and Peruvian documentary makers had embarked on a bidding war for rights to Juanita. Others were also beseiging the team. One firm approached Reinhard with a bizarre proposal: it wanted to extract eggs from Juanita’s ovaries. These, it suggested, could be used for a daring experiment. By fertilizing the ova with modern sperm, the team hoped to create an Inca baby.
Reinhard dismissed the Inca in vitro proposal out of hand. He also arranged for a postponement of the German documentary and tried to hold the Peruvian press at arm’s length. National Geographic had obtained first publication rights to the story in exchange for funding for the return expedition to Ampato and for conservation work on Juanita. “This was, and still is, a standard clause for all grants given out by the National Geographic Society,” Reinhard explained. Indeed, the American archaeologist was writing the article himself in hopes that the ensuing publicity would bring in scarce research funds for Juanita. But dodging the local press proved extremely difficult: Peruvian reporters had begun besieging Guillén and her colleagues for tidbits of news.
In Lima, government officials began mulling over plans for a major museum exhibition of Juanita. This touched off another heated battle among the mummy experts. The Austrians were deadset against any public display of mummies. Spindler and Seidler had done much soul-searching about the ethics of exhibition during their own studies of the Iceman. They saw nothing wrong in examining the dead for the benefit of science and the knowledge of humankind, but they considered all public display of ancient bodies a callous act of disrespect. A well-preserved mummy, they argued, was as recognizable as a modern corpse. As such, it demanded a similar degree of protection and privacy from prying eyes. Even the best-intentioned museum exhibit attracted thrill seekers: galleries filled with mummies were little better than carnival sideshows and chambers of horror.
Quite apart from these ethical considerations, the Austrians also believed it impossible to both preserve and display a frozen body. No one had yet designed an exhibition case capable of regulating temperature and humidity sufficiently to ward off condensation and bacterial growth on human flesh. After discussing the matter at length, Spindler, Seidler, and Guillén agreed that the wisest approach was to stabilize Juanita and get on with serious scientific studies. Guillén and the Austrians particularly wanted to examine the young Inca girl by three-dimensional CT scanning, for they regarded this as the next best thing to an autopsy. In Austria, Spindler and his team had gleaned much valuable data from such CT scans of the Iceman, and they offered Reinhard the use of their facilities and their experienced staff.
Reinhard listened to these discussions with mounting irritation. He was beginning to feel extremely pressured. High-ranking Peruvian government officials, including President Alberto Fujimori, were all in favor of exhibiting Juanita: such a show could spark new interest in the country’s rich Andean past and the resulting press coverage could attract droves of tourists, who had steered clear of the Andes since the civil war. Reinhard was privately opposed to the idea of placing Juanita on exhibit, but he felt he had little choice in the matter. “We had to show Juanita,” he told me. “Government officials were coming and demanding to see her.”
Privately, he confided his predicament to staff at the National Geographic Society, who agreed to help him find a suitable case for conserving Juanita. “It needed to be done,” recalled Stuart. “I think, too, they realized that it had great potential as public relations, either positive or negative, but both to the extreme.” Quietly, society staff began making phone calls. The Carrier Corporation, an American refrigeration company also known for its climate-control system for the Sistine Chapel, offered to build two $250,000 customized display cases for Juanita free of charge, certain that the ensuing hoopla would more than compensate for the costs. At Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, radiologists agreed to conduct expensive stereolithic CT scans pro bono.
When the National Geographic Society presented these offers to Reinhard, it added a proposal of its own. If Juanita was to journey to the States for the scans and the customized case anyway, it would be a prime opportunity for an American exhibit. Where better than in the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, which was close to Johns Hopkins Hospital? The society often mounted exhibits on its research projects there. Moreover, such a show would attract intense press coverage for Peru and publicize the plight of the mummies. Reinhard was pleased, but the final decision wasn’t his. The Peruvian government owned the mummy. Before reaching a decision, Peruvian officials sought advice from advisory committees of lawyers, archaeologists, conservators, and physical anthropologists. All four committees approved the mummy’s export.
In Lima, Guillén was stunned by the news that Juanita would be traveling to the United States and the National Geographic Society headquarters. With its immense influence, the society had gone far beyond funding research and reporting the news. This was disturbing enough to Guillén and to the Austrians, who felt increasingly left out of the major decisions over the mummy. But there were also other key issues. Guillén could scarcely believe that the society had succeeded in cornering an exhibit of one of the most important Peruvian archaeological finds of the past century, displaying it to Americans before a public exhibition could be arranged in Peru and before scientists had had an opportunity to study the body thoroughly. She worried that such an exhibition would offend the sensibilities of Native Americans, who opposed the display of aboriginal remains. Furious at the prospect, she mounted a spirited public protest in Lima’s most important newspaper, El Commercio, enlisting the support of prominent Peruvian anthropologists.
The Austrians were equally incensed. To argue their case, Spindler and Seidler arranged to meet officials from Catholic University and Peru’s National Institute of Culture at a lunch at the Austrian embassy. By the time dessert was served, Seidler and the Austrian ambassador were fuming: their luncheon companions refused to back down from the plans. Outraged, the Austrians, too, went public with their criticism. Spindler accused National Geographic point blank of cultural imperialism. “What is being done there,” he observed to a New York Times contributor, “is, from my point of view, a mixture of Hollywood and Disneyland against a background of trying to achieve successful sales, while science makes a crash landing.”
In Peru, Reinhard was stung by the reaction. “He was really under pressure as the tall gringo on the make,” recalled Stuart sympathetically. “It is always a position of extreme vulnerability in public relations.” Nevertheless, Juanita was shipped to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in May 1995, just eight months after her discovery. There she underwent CT scanning and biopsies and was sent on to Washington, where she was installed in the National Geographic Society headquarters for a monthlong exhibition.
The display proved immensely popular: more than 100,000 people squeezed through the doors. “They physically couldn’t get any more people through,” recalled Reinhard. “There were times when there were lines going around the block and people waited three hours. And you only had four minutes inside.” Hillary Clinton stopped by to see her. So did Alberto Fujimori. And soon everyone was talking about her. Even Bill Clinton cracked a famous joke about her at a political dinner. A fellow Democrat had earlier quipped that Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole was so old that he had dated the Inca mummy in high school. Clinton picked up the theme. “I don’t know if you’ve seen that mummy,” remarked the president during a speech to the audience, “but you know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out. That’s a good-looking mummy.”
AFTER HER STINT in Washington, Juanita was flown back to Arequipa, where she was placed on display. Curious visitors gazed in awed silence at her icy body, but as they came and went, prominent Andeanists in North America were beginning to ask questions. They were hungry to learn more about Juanita and her two frozen Ampato companions. Spanish colonial records had etched a rough sketch of the capacocha ceremonies, but the descriptions lacked many vital details that would shed critical light on the workings of Inca society. In particular, Andean archaeologists and anthropologists wanted to know exactly what had taken place on the remote peak and how the children had been chosen for this fate and how they had died.
Aware that his colleagues were waiting, Reinhard wrote a brief article for National Geographic describing some of the key findings from the CT scans. While examining the images, Johns Hopkins radiologist Elliot Fishman had noticed a dark two-inch-long fracture curling along the right side of the girl’s skull. More ominously still, her brain seemed to have been pressed to one side of her cranium. To Fishman, it looked as if a hemorrhage from one of the major arteries in the brain had pushed the tissue to one side before death. He had seen similar injuries many times before in emergency room cases when assailants beat their victims with baseball bats. From this, Fishman concluded that Juanita had been clubbed to death on the remote Andean mountaintop.
But this confident diagnosis and reconstruction of Juanita’s death puzzled some leading Andean researchers. Indeed, they found the scenario rather hard to believe. The whole point of the capacocha rite, observed Sabine MacCormack, an American expert on Inca religion, was to offer the gods a perfect human being. Inca authorities had deliberately sought out flawless children, discarding those with even a slight skin blemish. Why then bludgeon one of these nearly perfect victims, violating the child’s body with a blow? It was not as if the Inca didn’t have other, gentler methods at their disposal. On the Chilean mountain El Plomo, priests had likely given a capacocha boy an intoxicating corn beer before lowering him into a mountaintop tomb. Inside the tomb, the boy had drifted off to sleep, gradually freezing to death. MacCormack strongly suspected that Juanita met a similar fate: “I think [her] death was by exposure and intoxication.”
Other researchers were similarly skeptical. In his extensive studies on human sacrifice in the more ancient Moche culture in Peru, physical anthropologist John Verano had noticed a striking sexual pattern to ritual executions. Adult males were generally the ones who suffered brutal, violent deaths. Executioners severed their heads or sliced open their throats and drank their blood, or sometimes they ripped their hearts out while they were still beating. Verano believed that these males were likely captives taken during warfare. Women and children, he observed, received very different treatment. They died more gently. Quite often, executioners strangled them with a special knot that helped extinguish consciousness quickly.
Verano found it hard to believe that an Inca priest would have clubbed a beautiful young child in the head. Moreover, he had doubts about Fishman’s diagnosis. If an assailant had battered Juanita to death, he explained, she would have bled profusely. But textile experts had detected no bloodstains on her clothing. It was quite possible that the skull fracture had happened after death, not before. “You know this mummy fell one hundred feet or more down the side of a mountain,” observed Verano in his New Orleans home, “and it may have landed on its head. So if it had a fracture, that would not be a surprise at all. This is a five-hundred-year-old body that has been through all kinds of changes—burial, defrosting, falling down a mountain, being carried on a bus, and all these other kinds of things.”
Fishman and his colleagues had arrived at the conclusions they did, suggested Verano, because of their experience with living or recently dead patients. They are not experts in the varied changes that ancient bodies go through over hundreds or thousands of years. That is the specialty of physical anthropologists and mummy experts such as Verano, Guillén, and Seidler. Fishman and his colleagues, said Verano, had “never worked with mummies before.”
In his West Virginia home, Reinhard vigorously defended the head-injury theory. During his own research, he had come across accounts from three Spanish chroniclers describing the sacrifice of capacocha children by a blow to the head. This form of execution, he maintained, was a far kinder and swifter death than that of burying someone alive or of strangling him. “I know this,” he explained, “as I’ve been knocked out cold six times in my life and I never knew I was hit until I woke up.” As for the ability of Fishman and his team to make the diagnosis, they were eminently qualified. One of the Johns Hopkins team members, he noted, had seen over one hundred deaths caused by blows to the head, far more than Verano ever had, and the fractures exactly resembled Juanita’s.
To resolve the matter, Verano hoped that Reinhard or his colleagues would publish all the available CT data so that others could evaluate it. But that, it seems to me, is one of the sad disappointments of the Juanita project. For all Guillén’s early hopes that the young Inca teenager would one day tell researchers as much about ancient Andeans as the Iceman had to say about ancient Europeans, Juanita was still something of a cipher to the scientific world, even five years after her discovery. Relatively little has made its way into the scientific press.
Reinhard maintained that there were good reasons for this. His co-director on the project, Chavez, had been absorbed in establishing a mummy-conservation laboratory and a mummy museum in Arequipa and in traveling to Japan for the yearlong exhibition of Juanita there. Reinhard, who had recently been appointed an Explorer in Residence at National Geographic, had been equally preoccupied. In addition to raising funds and mounting more than half a dozen major expeditions to the Andes in search of yet more Inca shrines and their mummies, he had been lecturing on his finds, serving as a consultant on television documentaries, penning articles and field reports on his later mummy discoveries, and co-authoring a major scientific book on his Llullaillaco finds.
The work that still lay ahead of him on all his mummy finds, however, seemed enough for several careers. Still Reinhard appeared reluctant to wrap up his fieldwork in the high Andes. He hoped to rescue yet more mummies from the avarice that had turned ancient cemeteries elsewhere in Peru into pitted moonscapes and had robbed so much of South America of its ancient birthright. In our conversations, he repeatedly stressed the importance of retrieving the Andes’ rich treasures and priceless scientific information before looters reached them with their sticks of dynamite. The pace of looting, he explained, had greatly accelerated in recent years. Better mountaineering gear had enabled more climbers to ascend to high elevations. Greater poverty in South America had driven local villagers to greater lengths of desperation. Higher prices commanded by artifacts had made plundering all the more lucrative.
I didn’t doubt any of this. But I wondered how many looters would have thought to risk their lives climbing South America’s highest mountains, were it not for what they had seen in the press of Juanita and of Reinhard’s other finds. “It’s a double-edged sword, these discoveries,” conceded Stuart sadly. “If you find a spectacular site and publicize it, people go in there and tear it apart.” And this struck me as terribly sad and tragic. It was Reinhard who had carried science to the highest peaks in South America, exhuming and retrieving the ancient dead in conditions so bitter and brutal that they pushed the human body and mind to the extremes of endurance. He had gone where few archaeologists could hope to follow, and he had succeeded admirably, thanks to his immense physical strength and stamina and mountaineering experience, in retrieving fragments of the past for science. For this, he has rightly received great acclaim and respect. But in doing so, Reinhard may have sadly hastened the destruction of some of the very mummies he hoped to save.