What happens inside us when we look at our dead ancestors?

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The Inca Huayna Cápac had been dead for three decades when his great-nephew, the young mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, went to meet him in person.

Huayna Cápac had been the most feared and powerful man on the continent and, as such, his corpse had received a treatment that prolonged his presence in the world of the living.

If the Spanish had not arrived, his body would have remained in his own palace, receiving veneration and communicating through an interpreter.

But, in the midst of the looting and battles of the Conquest, the body of the ancient Inca was captive in the house of the Spanish magistrate Polo de Ondegardo, in Cusco, converted into a mute and indecipherable object for the European gaze.

He did not seem dead, the chroniclers wrote, and he even retained eyelashes and eyebrows.

The same was true of the Inca Pachacutec, whose eyes covered by a gold membrane looked natural and his long-haired skull was intact, except for an incision resulting from a probable surgery.

Where did beings of such a nature belong?

Was there a place for them in the world that had just begun?

Unlike other conquistadors eager to plunder and destroy these “idols,” Corregidor Ondegardo believed that studying Inca customs could facilitate the Conquest.

So he seized five real mummies and installed them in his house, as a kind of first anthropological laboratory or museum.

The Incas had not only perfected the techniques of preserving corpses, but also those of cranial surgery, following a tradition of six to eight thousand years of practices to prolong life even beyond death, as explained by historian Christopher Heaney, professor from Pennsylvania State University, in his recent book

Empires of

the

Dead

.

Ondegardo did not have the capacity to understand such challenging knowledge.

But he knew that a relative of the Incas, the young Garcilaso, was going to go to Spain and he organized a meeting.

The cover of Christopher Heaney's book, 'Empires of the Dead' (Oxford University Press, 2023).Oxford University Press

Years later, when he was already an established writer in Spain, the old Garcilaso would remember with some frustration the meeting with Huayna Cápac, since he had not been curious enough to find out more about the fascinating conservation of his ancestor.

Huayna Cápac would end up disappearing in a hospital in Lima, decades later.

But the day they were face to face, Garcilaso dared to touch the old Inca's finger.

It seemed hard to him like “a wooden statue.”

His words revealed a mixture of melancholy, anger and anxiety in the face of a world that was falling apart without him being able to understand it.

What happens to us, within us, when we look at our dead ancestors?

The answer has to do with who looks, who is looked at, and the historical context of the contact: from the Inca Garcilaso touching Huayna Cápac (

Real Comments,

1609), to the writer Gabriela Wiener confronting the looting of her ancestor Charles Wiener, in a French museum (

Huaco portrait

,

2021), or the Aymara writer Quispe Flores (

Ciudad Apacheta

, 2023) feeling that he has more connection with the bones locked in a glass case than with the country that proudly displays them.

In

Empires of the Dead,

Heaney documents half a millennium of relationships between the living and the dead in what we now call America, a period in which the latter have been venerated, plundered, burned, mourned, collected, “harvested,” exported, hoarded, auctioned. , exhibited, disputed and even repatriated.

Through the Inca

mummies

, Heaney reconstructs the history of colonization, capitalism and the birth of anthropology, and at the same time exposes the emotions and actions that the pre-Hispanic dead have inspired in the living.

“Andean ancestors and remains,” she writes, “have the power to move and transform those who awaken them.”

Heaney's book is a catalog of views and points of view.

In the 17th century, he says, Spanish priests saw paganism in these

mummies

and sought them out to burn them in large bonfires.

The indigenous people, often forced to witness these spectacles, cried at the destruction of their

grandparents

.

Living and dead they experienced the violence of the conquest.

In 1687, surgeon Lionel Wafer attempted to move the mummy of a ten-year-old boy, convinced that the discovery would cement his scientific career in London.

The sailors, on the other hand, feared that the corpse was a carrier of curses capable of sinking their boat, and they threw it into the ocean.

Republican politicians have put mummies to work at the service of the national bureaucracy.

General San Martín, who had just achieved the Independence of Peru in 1821, sent a newly unearthed mummy to the king of England, as an ideal gift to establish diplomatic relations with his country.

He believed that the mummy would be displayed in a special place in the Museum of London, but the English bureaucrats saw nothing extraordinary in that set of bones and sent it to a medical museum, where she finally disappeared.

Scientists in the United States would have appreciated that wasted gift.

Obsessed with proving that the white race was superior and therefore destined to dominate the others, surgeons like George Morton compulsively collected skulls of “ancient Peruvians.”

They measured them and drew racist conclusions.

The Quechua archaeologist Julio C. Tello, on the other hand, found in the trepanned skulls proof that ancient Peruvians practiced brain surgery with more successful results than modern European doctors.

For Heaney, Tello's scientific contribution becomes epic because of his anti-racist spirit: he not only proposed a new way of looking at the dead, but also at the populations that descended from them.

As Heaney tells it, many colleagues in Peru and the United States despised Tello because they considered him an insolent Indian, someone whose place in society was not to study but to be studied.

Tello understood that the sense of authority of those white academics did not come from their merits, but from a long history of silencing indigenous work and thought.

One day, when he was a teenager, he found in a book an image of a skull with trepanation marks that looked familiar: it was the same one that his father had found and kept for years at home, in the Andean province of Huarochirí.

The image accompanied an article signed by two scientists, one from Lima and the other from the United States, but it said nothing about its true discoverer.

In the printed image of that skull, Tello saw his father silenced.

Later, when he was finally able to hold a skull in his own hands, he felt “the message of the race whose blood” ran through his veins.

From that moment on, he would recall, “I became an anthropologist.”

American tomb opener and collector George Kiefer (left) with Swedish archaeologist Knut Hjalmar Stolpe (center) and his team in 1884. National Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm

Like many Peruvians, I studied Tello and his discoveries in high school, but we never revisited the personal scenes Heaney describes in his book.

The teachers did not emphasize the identity of universal indigenous people like Julio C. Tello or the poet César Vallejo, who had called themselves Indians or cholos in a gesture of challenge and vindication.

But in the nineties, when I was educated, the only way to talk about “Indians” or “cholos” in school was when we insulted each other, as if all our indigeneity and the pride we should feel had been buried by decades of racism and shame.

Academics and education bureaucrats had silenced Tello.

To do?

Heaney has a special talent for transferring the historical story to the territory of contemporary anxieties, so that that question surfaces at various moments, like a rumor that he invites to close the book suddenly to take action.

This is where Heaney suggests we stop to rethink what we know and what we think we know.

The author tells that, in 2014, a young woman named Madeleine Fontenoit went to work at a museum in Texas, excited because she knew that there was an “Inca mummy” that she was dying to see.

When the director opened the box containing that treasure, Fontenoit came across an unexpected truth.

A girl of six to eight years old was resting there, “so out of place.”

From then on, she became obsessed with sending that body back home.

Let's think.

What is the current home for a person buried several centuries earlier, in another world, in another era?

The girl was finally transferred to Peru.

The authorities sent her to the National Museum of Archeology, Anthropology and History, where she was taken to a warehouse.

Was she where she really belonged?

Every desecrated corpse was once a person whose final rest was taken from them.

The West

discovered

this part of the world in 1492 but it took several centuries to learn to look with respect on those who lived and inhabit this land.

The book is called

Empires of the Dead

because it discusses the impact of successive empires until reaching the United States, whose museums and universities (Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, to name a few) used Peru as a source of accumulation and knowledge.

Heaney places us in a key scene.

The year is 1965 in Washington, and the Smithsonian Museum opens its Hall of Physical Anthropology.

There, a wall covered with 160 skulls of “ancient Peruvians” stands out, which reflects the exponential growth of the human population.

The heads make up a kind of mushroom, says Heaney.

Every three units represent three hundred million people.

But for organizers, the skulls themselves have no meaning.

They could have used tennis balls or apples and it would have made no difference.

The museum director explained his reasons to a reporter: “We use Peruvian skulls because we have many.”

The story of how those skulls arrived at the Smithsonian is in part the tragic story of Republican Peru, a country whose laws and authorities have actively promoted the looting and excavation of our pre-Hispanic dead.

Between 1839 and 1929, by law, anyone could open tombs, keep the finds, and even export them.

Explorers such as Alĕs Hrdlička and Hiram Bingham sent immense shipments of mummies and skulls to the United States.

The entire country was an open grave.

It was enough to sink your hands in the sands of Ancón or Arica to find corpses, the travelers said.

In that world that was beginning to separate between industrial centers and resource-providing peripheries, Peru was a happy exporter of raw materials, so rich in dead people that sometimes shipments of guano arrived at their destinations mixed with mummies.

Grave mining was such a thriving industry that Heaney prefers to compare it to a type of mining.

That history has left notable traces.

The neighborhood where I grew up is called Mangomarca, it is in the east of Lima, and its heart is not a square with trees and benches but an esplanade where an old mud pyramid survives: a huaca, the Huaca de Mangomarca.

Nobody in my neighborhood knew how old it was (2,000 years).

There were also no information signs or prohibitions, much less a museum;

so we lived in a quiet collective ignorance about our own history.

I loved touring the huaca by bicycle.

You had to have a lot of skill to avoid the numerous craters that dotted it.

Several times I surprised teenage couples kissing in those mysterious holes.

We didn't know it: we lived and loved in a great outraged pantheon.

They had taken not only the dead but the very history of what had happened.

While reading Heaney's book, I mentally returned to that huaca several times.

When he closed his eyes, overwhelmed by the information, he imagined that those craters were filling up again.

That the earth and its dead were reunited.

And that together, the ancestors and us, we began to heal.