Going to Extremes

by Nick Middleton

  But what we do know is that the coastal Chinchorro must have experienced some fundamental changes to their culture around 3,000 years ago (the oldest mummy prepared by humans has been dated at 7,050 years old), because the doll-like mummies disappeared and bodies began to be interred as individuals.

  Calogero led me through a door from the mortuary for the long dead into a laboratory where four more recent bodies were lined up sitting in trays awaiting examination and dating. Sitting they almost literally were, because these corpses had all been buried in a foetal position. They were more recognizable than the dolls as unadulterated human forms since they had been preserved not by artificial mummification but by the natural aridity and salt of the Atacama. The state of preservation was incredible, although Calogero deduced from the woven clothing the bodies were wrapped in that they were several thousand years old. These people had their hair, toenails and teeth. The skin was parched and stretched taut across their bones, but the sinews on their feet were clearly visible. Even the fingerprints on the hands were unmistakable. Dryness had robbed the faces of eyes and noses, but otherwise the features were totally recognizable. It was only the unaffected hair in plaits that lent their expressions an alien air.

  ‘The conditions in the Atacama are ideal for preservation,’ Calogero said. ‘The oldest naturally preserved Chinchorro specimen we’ve found has been dated at 7,020 years before Christ. But, if a human body was buried in the sand today, it would look like this in a few months.’ He paused. ‘We are always getting phone calls from people telling us of new bodies,’ he added, indicating several rows of shelves behind us lined with innumerable human heads, some just skulls, but many with desiccated skin like the full bodies in front of me.

  If this level of preservation occurred so fast, I wondered if some of the bodies were more recent, victims of General Pinochet’s purges, the disappeared whose bodies were supposed to have been dumped in the desert during the 1970s and 80s.

  Calogero nodded. ‘Sadly, not all are so old,’ he told me. ‘The preserved body of someone who died a few decades ago looks very similar to these. On first inspection, before we date them, it is only the clothes that allow us to guess at their age.’

  As I was leaving, Calogero pointed out another, much smaller human form perched on a shelf beneath a line of heads. It was the body of a small baby, chubby and with tiny fingers. The skin was brown and soft to look at. I couldn’t help but be reminded of a dried fruit. ‘How old is this one?’ I asked. ‘About 2,500 years,’ Calogero replied. ‘We think it was probably killed by strangulation,’ he added. ‘Here you can still see the marks.’ He pointed to a linear smudge on the baby’s stretched neck. ‘It might have been one of twins. Andean peoples were suspicious of twins.’ In a sense, that didn’t seem so different from the reasons put forward to excuse political murders in the modern era.

  When I left the laboratory and walked out into the bright sunlight in the museum’s lush garden, I was feeling strange. I had found being waist deep in dead people rather off-putting after a while, but I was also disappointed in how quickly I had begun to talk about the bodies as if they were artefacts rather than real individuals who had died a long time ago. I had asked Calogero how old the baby was, but the little boy had clearly been less than a year old when he died. He’d just been dead for 2,500 years.

  Despite my unconscious attempt to distance myself from the dead people on show in the museum, I realized the following day that I could never make it as an archaeologist. I had travelled out of Arica down the coast to a spot near the fishing village of Caleta Camarones. It was a site Calogero had told me about, where the museum staff had found numerous Chinchorro bodies.

  I enlisted a ten-year-old boy from the village to show me where I should be looking. In a world-weary tone that was far beyond his years, he told me that of course he knew where the mummies were. Would he show me, I asked. ‘Well I haven’t got anything else to do,’ he replied.

  He led me up and along a dirt track cut high into the precipitous sand-covered cliffs that plunged down into an aquamarine sea. As we walked round the headland, I asked him what he was going to be when he grew up. ‘I’m going to be a doctor,’ he replied confidently. ‘I’m going to study,’ he added, ‘but if I’m unlucky I’ll just be a fisherman.’

  We walked on in silence, me pausing on occasion to jot down some notes about the coastline. In the distance, I could see some small fishing boats bobbing up and down by a short jetty. As we neared the spot, the boy looked at me quizzically and said, ‘You look like a tourist, but you’re not are you?’ ‘Not really,’ I told him. ‘I’m writing a book.’

  He nodded knowledgeably, as if he’d had a few itinerant authors through here and was still trying to decide whether or not he approved of them. If he didn’t make it as a doctor, I thought, perhaps he could become a publisher.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing to a place about 3 metres above the track.

  I looked in the direction he was pointing, but couldn’t see anything. It was just a sandy slope with a few stones. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be looking for. I couldn’t believe that it would be anything as dramatic as a mummified foot sticking out of the sand. I saw what I thought was a black stick about 40 centimetres long, then a piece of cloth, more like an old rag really, but of the same texture as those I’d seen in the museum.

  ‘Ah yes,’ I said, ‘is it a piece of clothing?’

  The small boy gave me his world-weary sigh.

  ‘No,’ he said, scrambling half-way up the slope towards the spot that he’d indicated and pointing again, ‘it’s some feet.’

  I started to climb up the slope myself, but slipped back in the sand. I had the spot in my focus now. Most of a sun-dried foot pointed upwards, its toenails clearly visible as such across the horizontal black stick that I had already seen. Only the black stick was nothing of the sort. It was a human shinbone and at its end was another partially buried foot. As on the specimens in the museum, the desiccated skin was perfectly preserved, although the sun had turned its colour to that of an over-ripe banana. Just beneath the sands must have lain another mummy, waiting to be excavated and taken to the laboratory for examination.

  After my junior guide had taken his leave, I wandered up and down the track alone, passing the mummified legs several times, trying to get to grips with what seemed like an open-air wholesalers for Chinchorro cultural artefacts. The more I looked, the more I saw. Not further bodies, but fragments of cloth, and hair, and pieces of bone that looked distinctly human to my untrained eye. Calogero had told me it was a rich site, but I hadn’t expected to see for myself in quite such graphic detail. Apparently, the museum hadn’t got the resources to excavate the site properly and had been trying to educate the locals to view the slope as a sort of open-air museum, a place to come and look, but not to rob. Grave robbers have already spoiled many such sites in this part of the world.

  The museum had done a good job, it seemed. I could easily have imagined the small boy digging up the legs that he’d showed me, so that he could start his human anatomy classes early. But such a thought could not have been further from his mind.

  On my final walk past the legs, on my way back towards the village, I caught sight of a round object almost totally buried in the sand. It was dark brown, rather smaller than a CD, but slightly spherical in shape. It looked just like the top of a buried coconut. I stopped. It couldn’t be a coconut, I thought to myself, because there are no coconuts here.

  I moved closer to my find that, like the legs, was located a couple of metres above the track. Perching precariously on the shifting sand, I picked up a flat stone from the slope and carefully dug a small amount of sand from the side of the round object. The sand slid away, revealing a little more and leaving a circle of salty residue, like a watermark from a receding lake, on the curved object. The portion I had uncovered was a slightly lighter brown than the top circle.

  I used my stone to move some more sand from the o
ther side. The curve started to straighten out, revealing the beginnings of a flatter surface turned out to sea and towards me. I dug again. More sand slid down past my knees. The flatter bit continued. My stomach tightened. With a couple more scoops from my stone, the beginnings of two symmetrical elongated bumps appeared across the bottom of the flat part.

  I hesitated, but moved more scoops of sand with my stone to reveal the tops of two eye sockets staring blindly out towards me.

  For a minute or so, I just looked at my find, not quite knowing what to do. I felt bad inside, like a grave robber myself. Then I carefully scooped sand back around the skull until just the dark brown top bit was visible as it had been when I’d first seen it. I decided to ring Calogero that night and tell him of my discovery. I’d been right; it wasn’t a coconut.

  F O U R

  The cold Humboldt Current is a two-edged sword running most of the length of South America’s Pacific coastline. It is largely responsible for the presence of the world’s longest stretch of desert and semi-desert that extends for more than 3,500 kilometres from southern Ecuador, through Peru to the Atacama of northern Chile. But at the same time, this cold expanse of water plays host to some of the richest marine life in any ocean. The reason for this lies in the current’s twin sources. On the one hand is water brought up from the Southern Ocean that surrounds the Antarctic, but this flow is complemented by water from deep down near the ocean floor. This deep upwelling water is also cold, because it starts so far from the sun’s warming rays, but it is rich in nutrients from the seabed too, so it supports a diverse array of marine life.

  The Chinchorro people relied on this fertility, and the ocean’s riches still provide some of Chile’s major exports today. I got a glimpse of the abundance of life beneath the waters when I stopped off on my way down the coast towards the area that Aldo, the meteorologist, had pointed me towards as the driest area in Chile. Mejillones used to be an important port for nitrate export, but is now just a workmanlike fishing village with a narrow sandy beach populated mainly by pelicans and gulls. Three large sea lions wallowed in the shallow waters that lapped at the stanchions of the sturdy jetty and more pelicans, standing in groups, occupied some of the many small boats bobbing at anchor in the water.

  I got talking with a swarthy fisherman named Rodrigo who told me he caught octopus when he could, since octopus could be sold at the best price. He was only allowed to catch them for six months of the year due to a partial ban introduced to preserve stocks, and the rest of the time he collected seaweed. He surprised me when he asked if I’d like to come along with him that morning.

  We motored out for an hour or so towards the arid headland, Rodrigo at the helm of his small red boat. When we reached a rocky promontory, he cut the outboard motor and took up the oars as his two friends, Enrique and Adolphe, pulled on their wet suits. Rodrigo said he would stay in the boat so I could use his wet suit if I wanted to.

  While Enrique dived with the aid of a lengthy yellow tube connected to an antiquated air pump in the boat, Adolphe and I donned snorkels. We each held long metal hooks to pull the octopus from their rocky lairs.

  It was exhausting work. The rocks lay 6 or 7 metres below the surface and it was the best I could do to dive to that depth, let alone stay down long enough to survey the crags for our prey. After an hour or so, Enrique and Adolphe had bagged 15 purple octopuses. All I had managed was one brief grapple. After I resurfaced, gasping for air, I dived again to resume the tussle, but couldn’t find the same crag. The only thing I caught was half a dozen sea urchin spines in my hand.

  Picking out the spines with a safety pin gave me something to do as we chugged our way back to port past a dead coastline on which nothing lived except a few seabirds, and even they only stayed long enough to have a shit and then fly on. Rocky islets, handy resting places for huge numbers of sea lions that barked at me mockingly, were also topped with seabirds and plastered with their white droppings. Before the Atacama’s sodium nitrate deposits were exported to Europe and North America as fertilizer, bird droppings amassed over hundreds of years along this arid coast served the same purpose. Guano from Peru and Chile was big business in the 1800s and Mejillones had originally been founded as a base for guano-gatherers. The vast numbers of birds on this coast, attracted by the enormous fish reserves, had built up guano deposits 40 metres deep in some places. The lack of rain meant that it was never washed away and the dry atmosphere prevented the nitrate in the droppings from evaporating, so maintaining its effectiveness. All the locals had to do was scrape the shit off the cliffs and sell it to rich farmers on other continents. Guano was just one in a long line of marine riches fed by the Humboldt Current. The distinction between barren desert and fecund ocean could not have been more stark. The coastal cliffs mark it like the cut of a knife. About the only thing that links the two is their salinity.

  Although the Humboldt Current is a central reason for the lack of rainfall along the Atacama coast, it does produce some precipitation, in the form of fog. In the late afternoon, moisture-laden air from far out over the Pacific Ocean moves in towards the coast and is cooled as it passes over the colder Humboldt waters. As the air cools, its capacity for holding moisture is decreased. When it reaches the coastline, the air is forced to rise up the coastal hills, cooling further until the moisture in the air condenses out as fog. This fog occurs all along the coastline of northern Chile, where it is known as camanchaca, and on the desert coast of Peru where they call it garua. Camanchacas roll in off the Pacific around 200 days every year, so although the amount of water they hold is small, they are a frequent and regular phenomenon.

  Ecologically, this recurring, if limited, supply of water, is important. Dotted along the coastline are small pockets of vegetation known as lomas that survive solely on camanchaca moisture. These plants exist in terrestrial islands, sort of fog oases, separated by hyperarid habitat where virtually no vegetation exists. Many of them are so finely adapted to the fog water that they are found nowhere else on Earth.

  People, too, have latched on to the importance of fog as a source of water in this desert. Archaeologists think that the Chinchorro set up their camps in lomas areas, taking advantage of the plants and associated animals to supplement their marine diet. Some even think that the Chinchorro collected water where the fog droplets condensed on flat cliff faces.

  At Chungungo, a modern successor to the Chinchorro idea has been developed. High on the hillside overlooking the small fishing village, an array of huge nets has been set up to catch the camanchaca as it races in off the ocean. Droplets of fog condense on the mesh and the water drips down into a plastic trough. The trough acts just like a gutter, channelling the collected water down through a pipe to a reservoir near the village, about 6 kilometres away.

  Pablo Osses, a geographer at the Catholic University in Santiago who was involved in the fog collection system at Chungungo, drove me up the hillside to look at the nets. About 30 of them were spread across the hilltop, each stretched between two posts like an oversized volleyball net. The idea had been born when one of his team had noticed fog condensing on the leaves of eucalyptus trees growing at the crest of the hill, he told me. The design of the nets was the result of considerable experimentation to hit on the best materials and the optimum size of net. These were made of polypropylene, which didn’t absorb the droplets like traditional fishing nets, but allowed them to drip down to the gutters below. The technology was fantastically simple, straightforward to construct and easily maintained. The nets didn’t need any power, they just sat there and did their job of harvesting the fog water.

  The system had been born of necessity. For several decades, Chungungo was supplied with water from a nearby iron mine, just over the crest of the hill. But when the mine closed down, tankers had to be hired to bring in the water by road. The water they brought was often of dubious quality because the trucks were also used to carry other liquids that left residues in the tanks, contaminating the water being delivered to t
he village. Sometimes the trucks broke down and simply didn’t arrive. The people of Chungungo had to live with a limited supply of poor quality freshwater for about 20 years.

  In the early 1990s, when 100 fog-collecting nets were strung across the hillside, each harvesting an incredible 170 litres of water a day, Chungungo was able to dispense with the truck service. Residents were able to double their consumption from about 15 litres per person per day to more than 30 litres. The nets provided water for everything. People drank fog water, washed with it, and even had enough to water their gardens. Some started to grow vegetables among their flowers.

  Although the fog didn’t roll in off the ocean every day, there was usually enough in the reservoir to tide the village over. A system of flags was introduced to let villagers know how much they had in store. A green flag meant that supplies were plentiful, yellow indicated that people should think before using it, and a red flag was raised when supplies were low and water should only be used for essential purposes until the next fog bank came in. Even so, the fog collectors were still more reliable than the trucks.

  For the first time, Chungungo was no longer reliant on outsiders for water. The villagers had an inexpensive, sustainable supply system that they ran themselves. It sounded perfect, but it wasn’t quite.