Alex Mosher and Edna Grant
Staff Writers
Researchers from Idaho State University, the Idaho Museum of Natural History, Michigan State University, the University of New Hampshire and Pennsylvania State University are collaborating to analyze and discover more about “Ñusta,” the 500-year-old Inca mummy who was returned to Bolivia after spending a century in the United States.
Ñusta, which translates to “princess” in the Quechua language, was a member of the Inca Empire in 1500 A.D. The U.S. Consul to Chile brought her mummified remains, along with pouches, beads, plant remains and leather objects, to Michigan State University in 1890, where they remained on display for 80 years.
“The consulate to Bolivia happened to have a relationship to MSU, and so it was brought to MSU through that [relationship],” said Samantha Blatt, an anthropologist at ISU who is currently involved in the collaboration. “This was way before the idea of what you should do — what the human rights of human remains are.”
In the 1970s, Ñusta was permanently removed from her museum display to help increase the awareness that it is considered disrespectful to ancestral figures to view the mummified body in a public setting. The Michigan state museum curator of the time, William Lovis, believed that Ñusta should be repatriated, Blatt said.
Repatriation, the returning of artifacts or artwork to the culture from whence it came, has become a crucial practice in anthropology.
“Repatriation is very important in anthropology now,” Blatt said. “Bolivia basically gave us permission to do these analyses, and all of the material from these analyses will be repatriated, too.”
Ñusta is presumed to be a capacocha, a ritual child sacrifice, buried among the peaks of the sacred Andes mountains. According to Blatt, capacocha children are buried in particular types of graves on mountain tops during the process of a ritual sacrifice.
“They have what are called huacas, sort of religious shrines they go through on this path to a mountain top where they are to be walled in after death,” she said.
These walled-in graves are called chullpas, which is what anthropologists believe Ñusta was buried in when she was found near La Paz, Bolivia.
According to historians and anthropologists, these rituals were performed as celebrations of the Empire or in times when the Empire needed to implore or appease their gods.
Children were chosen between the ages of five to 12, often times from elite families, and presented to the gods for various reasons as worthy sacrifices.
“They are also buried with a lot of burial goods,” Blatt said. “She was found with llama figurines and beautiful textiles and bags full of coca leaves.”
These goods were normally a part of the sacrificial ceremony. The inclusion of burial goods at Ñusta’s burial site inform the anthropology team’s theory that she is a capacocha, Blatt said.
As of now, the exact process of the original recovery of Ñusta and the items found with her are unknown. Michigan State University anthropologists William Lovis and Gabe Wrobel conducted recent studies on the contents of the pouches, making sure not to disturb the integrity of the remains, and found that the maize within them date back to approximately 1470.
Some scholars suggest that she was a product of human sacrifice, while others, such as anthropologist Thomas Besom, state that the fact she was placed in a chullpa tower suggests that it is unlikely she was a sacrificial victim.
However, MRI scans and histological analyses of her hair and teeth suggest that she may have been in good health up until her death.
Ñusta was repatriated to Bolivia in January of this year. The North American universities involved in this collaboration are the current custodians of the materials which have been lent to them by the Bolivian consulate. These materials include hair and teeth and a small variation of burial items.
Blatt and Amy Commendador from the Idaho Museum of Natural History have been working together with their collaborators to learn as much as they can about Ñusta.
“To get the whole context of her story, we need to gather all of these together,” Blatt said. “But that’s kind of what we do in Anthropology, anyway.”
