Chinchorro mummies
— — seven thousand years held in the salt.
Not only on a wall.
“The Chinchorro were a coastal fishing people of the Atacama desert, on the dry shore between Ilo in southern Peru and Antofagasta in northern Chile. They began artificially preparing their dead around 5000 BC, about two thousand years before Egypt. Their mummies were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2021 and are held in museums around Arica.
Chinchorro mummies, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Chinchorro culture occupied a narrow strip of the Atacama coast in what is now the Arica y Parinacota and Tarapacá regions of northern Chile, and southernmost Peru, between roughly 7000 and 1500 BC. They were a sedentary fishing people, living off a rich cold-current marine ecology brought by the Humboldt, and they had no agriculture. Their territory centred on the mouths of small rivers such as the Camarones and the Lluta, which broke the otherwise rainless desert and gave the settlements fresh water at the edge of the sea.
The Chinchorro began artificially preparing their dead around 5000 BC, the oldest known practice of human mummification, predating Egypt by roughly two thousand years. The bodies were defleshed, the skeletons reinforced with sticks and reed bundles, the skin replaced, and the face finished with a clay mask. Black mummies, dating from about 5000 to 3000 BC, were followed by red and bandaged styles through about 1700 BC. UNESCO inscribed the settlement and artificial mummification sites on the World Heritage list in July 2021.
The principal collection is held at the Museo Arqueológico San Miguel de Azapa, in the Azapa valley about twelve kilometres inland from Arica, administered by the Universidad de Tarapacá. A second site in central Arica, the Museo de Sitio Colón 10, preserves a Chinchorro burial in situ beneath a glass floor where it was found during construction in 2004. Most original mummies are held under conservation conditions, with a smaller curated set on public display. Access to the desert burial sites themselves is restricted under the World Heritage management plan.