Museo Leymebamba
In the afternoon, we went to Museo Leymebamba. It was build in 2000 to house around 200 mummies and their burial offerings found at Laguna de los Condores that were at the risk of being looted. It was founded privately on the initiative of Austrian donors (which I found surprising. I did not find out what circumstances lead to a group of Austrians founding a museum in a secluded region of Peru). It is really worth going there, as the artefacts are well explained, and things are put into context. The 200 hundred mummies in kneeling position are placed in racks in a climate chamber, and may be a spooky sight for the unsuspecting visitor… Some of them are still in their bags into that the Chachapoya had sewn them.
Laguna de los Condores
Laguna de los Condores is a 3 day trip by foot or horse from Leymebamba (should I be ever again in that region, I know already what I will do…). The funeral complex was build into a cavity of a wall about 100 meters above the lake. The finds date from the Chachapoya time (AD 800-1470), the Chachapoya-Inca time (1470-1532), and the early colonial time (1532-1570). Even though it is rainy, there apparently is a dry and cold micro climate that prevented the decomposition of the mummies. Probably, the place was not used for 700 years as a burial site, but constructed, and then mummies dating from different times were reburied there.
The funeral site was then forgotten, and overlooked for several hundred years until a family of shepherds and their employees found it by chance in 1996. They started looting it and sold the burial offerings on the black market. A quarrel between the family and their employees over money ended this lucrative business when they pressed charges against one another. Nobody was ever convicted. In 1997, the mummies and their offerings were saved by archaeologists in an rescue excavation.
Unlike the name suggests, there are no condors flying over Laguna de los Condores. According to the guide, the name was assigned rather recently to the lake to make it more attractive to tourists (I would suggest to go the next step as well, and to deploy some condors there — I would certainly appreciate to snap some pictures of flying condors after a 2 days hike :-))
