Mummy mystery GMC geology professor to dig into Chilean burial methods
By Gordon Dritschilo Staff Writer - Published: January 31, 2010
POULTNEY — A Green Mountain College professor will use a Fulbright Grant to explore the origins of some of the world's oldest mummies.
Geologist John Van Hoesen will leave for Chile in early 2011 to join in studies of mummies left behind by the Chinchorro people. He will work with a Chilean colleague.
Van Hoesen said the Chinchorro mummies, which predate the Egyptians at 5,000 to 7,000 years old, are some of the best preserved ever found.
"There's a great example of a mummy where you can still see the wrinkles in the skin of their fingers," he said. "The preservation process is kind of morbid and disgusting, but really interesting to archeologists."
The Chinchorro would skin their dead, disassemble the bodies, make a frame for them from reeds and then sew the skin back on. Then they would cover them with clay. The clay they used contained manganese, which is where Van Hoesen comes in.
"There's absolutely no manganese anywhere near the sites where they buried these bodies," he said. "The reason that is interesting — finding the source of those materials would help explain where the people in this part of South America came from."
The nearest known manganese deposits are 60 to 80 kilometers away from the site. Van Hoesen said most archeologists believe the Chinchorro would not have traveled more than 40 kilometers. In the arid landscape, they would have had to carry water with them.
"That's a long way to walk just to get materials to mummify your dead," he said.
Another theory holds that the Chinchorro used a local source of the mineral that they exhausted.
"That theory isn't very strong," Van Hoesen said. "The geology there around the coast — it shouldn't support manganese."
Van Hoesen will do chemical comparisons between the manganese on the mummies and at the remote sites. If they match, Van Hoesen said, it will lend credibility to the theory that the Chinchorro were highland people who moved to the coast.
Van Hoesen also plans to hike up two river beds in the area, looking into the possibility that manganese might have washed downstream. He said it will take him five to seven days to reach potential deposit sites for testing.
Van Hoesen will work with Bernardo Arriaza of the Instituto de Alta Investigación, Universidad de Tarapacá and the San Miguel de Azapa Archaeological Museum. Van Hoesen said he met Arriaza while Arriaza was a graduate student at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Arriaza has previously helped test soil at the burial sites.
While in Chile, Van Hoesen said he will also teach a course on geographic information systems, incorporating some of the field work for the project into the class, and teach workshops on use of a scanning electron microscope.
Van Hoesen is the fourth faculty member at GMC to recently get a grant from the Fulbright Program, which promotes cooperation between American and foreign academics. The program has sent a Green Mountain art professor to Korea, and education professor to Slovakia and an ecologist to Japan.
gordon.dritschilo@rutlandherald.comhttp://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20100131/NEWS01/1310370/1002/NEWS01
