How to Make an Inca Mummy

Andean Embalming, Peruvian Science, and the Collection of Empire

Bibliographic Data

ID4174539
AuthorsChristopher Heaney (0000-0001-8684-560X, Pennsylvania State University, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume109
Issue1
Pages1-27
Publication date2018-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIsis (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/697020
OpenAlexW2790917414
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited53

As scientific objects, mummies were born of Europe’s encounter with two “ancient” bodily knowledges. The first is well known: the embalmed Egyptian dead who were ground into a materia medica named mumia and later were collected as “mummies” themselves. Yet mummies owe their global possibility—of ancient sciences of embalming and environmental manipulation apprehensible worldwide—to the sixteenth-century Spanish encounter with the Incas’ preserved dead, the yllapa. This article argues that their confiscation and display desecrated their sacred affect, but their recategorization as “embalmed” bodies allowed Indigenous Peruvian writers to argue for the Incas’ lost medical sophistication. European scholars then used that sophistication to establish “mummies” as a comparative category. The original yllapas decayed, blurring both Inca sovereignty and the colonial Latin American sciences that anatomized it, but their imagined resurrection in the preserved bodies of other “ancient Peruvians” turned the “Inca mummy” into a highly collectible scientific object, embodying a newly national past of ancient learning and anti-imperial indictment

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Biology · Colonialism · Egyptology · Embalming · Empire · Indigenous · Object (grammar · Osiris · Sophistication · Classics · Conservation Techniques and Studies · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy · Psychedelics and Drug Studies

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