CA1- MUSEO SANTUARIOS ANDINOS
This summer holiday, my parents, my sister and I have been to Peru. We
travelled with a guide and a group through Peru. In a city in Peru, called
Arequipa, there was a museum which we visited. This was the Museo Santuarios
andinos. This museum is mostly about high-altitude archaeology. Its pioneer
Johan Reinhard and the museum is famous for the mummified remains of 13year-old Juanita. Peru is famous for its earlier inhabitants the Incas; they made
huge agricultural development and they integrated instead of taking places by
force. The Incas also implemented the practice of sacrificing children on the
peaks of the area’s highest mountains. It is said that they sacrificed to appease
the mountain spirits before they crossed the mountain, they sacrificed children
because they were seen as pure. Except for Juanita there are also 18 other
mummies in the museum, but Juanita is the most famous one because she is still
very much intact and because she was a nobility (they could see this by the
clothes she was wearing). She is very intact, because she was frozen in ice.
These sacrifices were considered an honour in the Inca period. The museum
includes all the things that were found with the sacrificed mummies.
This museum shows a lot about Peru’s culture and especially about the Inca
culture.
When we were in Peru we had a free day in Arequipa. I’ve always been
interested in history, old cultures and especially mummies. I’m interested in
these things, because I like to discover how people and culture differ and
develop, and mummies are just very interesting because those ‘people’ are so
real and they look almost alive while most of them have been dead for over 50
years! So my dad and I decided to visit the Santuarios andinos museum.
An undertaking in the museum was the start. Before we would really enter the
museum and start the tour, we had the chance to watch a short film about
Juanita and the Inca sacrifices. We took that chance and it taught me a lot more
about the Inca culture and about Juanita. There have been many archaeologists
researching the Inca culture. When they discovered Juanita, she was still
completely intact. Actually all the damage that she has is because they couldn’t
take her with them right away when they found her. A couple of months later,
Johan Reinhard and his partner Miguel Zárate who found her first, went back
with more people to take Juanita. When they came back to where they had found
her, she was not there. There is a famous story about how one of the men came
up with a smart plan to find the girl: they threw down a big rock and saw were it
landed. This way they did indeed find Juanita who had rolled down the hill.
Because she rolled down she came in contact with the sun which damaged her,
however she was still the most intact mummy ever found. The story behind
Juanita fascinated me and made me want to see Juanita with my own eyes.