Jannina Campos walks up a sandy hillside in Arica, a port city on the edge of the Atacama desert, the driest place on the planet.
The slope is dotted with dozens of orange markers placed in December. Each indicates skeletal remains recently uncovered by unusually strong winds and increased rainfall.
“Every time a body appears we place a flag, and we bury it again,” said Campos, an archaeologist. “They’ve been preserved there for 7,000 years.”
The sprawling cemetery belongs to the Chinchorro, an ancient culture of hunters and fishers who painstakingly mummified their dead. After stripping their loved ones of their skin and organs, they swaddled their skeletons in elaborate confections of reeds, sea lion skins, clay, alpaca wool, and wigs of human hair, trusting in the arid desert climate to preserve them for eternity.
