7,000-year-old mummy - PHOTO

La Tercera newspaper reported that the ground-breaking find was made by chance on Saturday during a visit to the Morro de Arica site by local students.The children, who are at-risk youths enrolled in an archeology workshop, were performing excavation work when one found a strange shape under dog droppings.Ancient archeological artifacts have been forced toward the surface following the powerful 8.2 earthquake that rocked the region in April, reports say.Trip organizer Hans Neira said the discovery of the mummy, part of the Chinchorro culture, showed that the area should be declared a protected zone.To the Chinchorro, deliberate preservation of their dead by means of mummification appears to have been a deeply religious act—a study in devotion. They likely believed that mummies were the bridge between the world of the living and the supernatural realm of the dead. What makes the Chinchorro so remarkable is the elaborate way in which they prepared their loved ones for the hereafter.'Chinchorro mummies are one of the wonders of Andean archaeology and of mortuary studies anywhere in the world,' exclaims Karen Wise of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who is excavating a cemetery at Ilo, Peru.What makes it all different from the Chinchorro culture is the fact that ancient Egypt saw exclusively kings and queens worth of mummification, unlike in Peru. Surprisingly, the Chinchorro community accorded everyone, regardless of age or status, this sacred rite, deeply honoring the dead and death as such.The Arica-Camarones area represents the bedrock of the Chinchorro culture, then the cemetery at El Morro is its mother lode: no other site in the region has yielded a larger or better preserved collection of artificial mummies so far. The practice came along by far earlier than that of the ancient Incas -  6,000 years before, to be exact.Chinchorro culture culminating from 7020 BC to 1500 BC consists of fishermen villages scattered along the coast of Atacama desert, from Ilo in Peru in the north to Antofagasta in the south.(dailymail.co.uk)Bakudaily.az