Unlooted Tombs Shed Light on the Incan Empire's Greatest Rivals

Chan Chan, the capital of the powerful Chimú Empire, was a sprawling, bustling metropolis on the coast of northern Peru some 600 years ago. At its height, it was the largest city in the Americas, spanning nearly eight miles. It boasted complex irrigation canals for farming and teemed with skilled artisans who crafted unparalleled gold and silver metalwork. The city thrived from around A.D. 900 to 1470—when it was conquered by the burgeoning Inca Empire.

Now, researchers excavating the city’s ruins have reported a once-in-a-lifetime discovery of unlooted tombs, revealing a new window into the elusive and little-known Chimú elites. The discovery, announced last week by Peru’s Ministry of Culture, will help contextualize previous Chimú findings and reshape archaeologists’ understanding of their enigmatic culture.

“Prior to this discovery, what was known about elite Chimú tombs came from platforms that had been looted and destroyed since colonial times,” Jorges Meneses, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation, said in a statement from the Ministry of Culture. From the 38 skeletons and various artifacts he and his colleagues recovered at the site, the archaeologists will now—for the first time—be able to piece together fragmentary evidence of the Chimú elite to better understand how they lived and governed one of Peru’s most formidable empires.

“It's a major discovery,” says National Geographic Explorer Gabriel Oscar Prieto, a Peruvian archaeologist at the University of Florida who was not involved with the research. “We have never dreamed to find anything like this in Chan Chan.”

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The new work focuses on a funerary platform within Ultzh An, one of ten large palace structures in Chan Chan. Four years ago, Peruvian archaeologists uncovered an impression in the ground that slowly gave way to two rooms and a descending staircase leading to a central chamber. During their recent excavations, they found two axes and two copper chisel-like tools in one room. In the other, they uncovered 20 skeletons alongside an abundance of ceramics, headdresses, and ornately designed necklaces and earrings made from quartz and seashells. Many of the bodies had their heads coated in rare cinnabar, a brightly colored mineral associated with the sacred and the elite. And in the central chamber they found one solitary person along with several shells and metal artifacts.

“It's clearly a very fancy person,” says Robyn Cutright, an anthropologist at Centre College in Kentucky who was also not involved with the research.

Chan Chan sprang from the remnants of the earlier Moche culture that lived in the same coastal region for nearly a thousand years beforehand, and the burial seems to resemble elite Moche graves where important figures were buried with retainers who were sacrificed to accompany the dead into the afterlife. (And the Chimú were no strangers to large ritual sacrifices.)

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While the person was undoubtedly important, they likely were not royalty, says Prieto. The funerary platform is located away from where the normal royals are buried, and the burial goods are not as lavish as those described by the Spanish when they looted royal graves. Prieto’s best guess is that it may have been a priest or significant religious figure.

“I was more excited by the weapons than anything else,” he adds.

While archaeologists have uncovered weapons from the Moche, Inca, Wari, and other Peruvian cultures, these two axes are the first weapons from the Chimú to be found. In addition to the 20 skeletons found in one chamber, they found 18 elsewhere on the funerary platform, for a total of 38 individuals.

Chan Chan is located near the town of Trujillo in northern Peru. In its prime, the city was larger than Mexico’s Tenochtitlan but held fewer people, with a population between five and six million. Most of what archaeologists know about Chimú culture comes from Chan Chan. 

Archaeological evidence suggests its people thrived on marine resources like oysters and fish, but they also ate llama, alpaca, and guinea pig, and had advanced farming techniques that provided a steady supply of cultivated plants, such as corn, beans, squash, guava, avocado, and chili peppers. They even had fields for cotton and peanuts. 

One of Chan Chan’s most defining features is its imposing palace-like structures, some of which towered up to 30 feet. Many of these buildings had only one entryway, suggesting they were exclusive and for privileged use. Unlike the Inca, who lived in the mountains, the Chimú built their architecture from adobe and mud brick. 

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“At the core of the city are these ten big, high-walled compounds,” says Cutright. “We know that there was a lot of veneration of ancestors and ritual that was happening inside of them.” The common townsfolk, who consisted of fishermen, herders, craftspeople, and lesser elites and bureaucrats, lived on the periphery. 

The Chimú maintained control over the capital for centuries until relations with their Andean neighbors, the Inca, boiled over. Radiocarbon dates and artifacts suggest that a significant shift struck Chan Chan around A.D. 1440 or 1450. The dating coincides with Spanish accounts of Incan records of a 30-year-long war between the Chimú and Inca that ended in the Chimú empire’s demise.

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The untouched tombs are a boon to archaeologists because heavy looting has robbed previous discoveries of valuable surrounding context. Looting has long plagued the Peruvian coasts and was considered a “cottage industry” to the colonial Spaniards, says Cutright.

“It can look like the surface of the moon,” says Cutright, with countless craters blemishing the once majestic site.

Researchers have identified many objects stored in museums or obtained from private collections that were likely associated with the Chimú elite, but because the artifacts were pilfered, they lack the details necessary to determine how they relate to the Chimú people.

“The city of Trujillo was founded in 1534 to actually loot the treasures of Chan Chan,” says Prieto. “It's unbelievable the degree of destruction.”

The new discovery will invariably reshape archaeologists’ understanding of the Chimú, he says. “This is just the peak of the iceberg for many more interesting discoveries to come.”