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Outside Egypt, in such widely separated places as the Aleutian Islands,
the Canary Islands, China, and the countries now composing what was the
Inca civilization, bodies preserved by various artificial means have been
found. The venerated mummies of the Inca kings were destroyed by the
Spanish. The Chinchoros culture of the Northern Chilean coast practiced
artificial mummification around 5000–3000 B.C., and around 4000 B.C.,
corpses were deliberately salted at La Paloma, in central Peru.
Pre-Columbian burials on the arid coast of Peru and Chile, often wrapped
in textiles, tended to become naturally mummified. In the late 1990s a
cache of late prehistoric mummies of the Chachapoyas culture was found in
a rock shelter in humid Northeastern Peru. In 1974 in the Changsha area of
China, an embalmed woman, later identified as a matron of the Han dynasty,
was disinterred, along with many artifacts, from an air- and watertight
tomb, in a remarkably well-preserved state. In Ürümqi (Urumchi), the
capital of Xinjiang (Chinese Turkistan), other exceptionally
well-preserved mummies, dating back as far as 4,000 years and having
European features, have posed a mystery to anthropolgists; some believe
they may be Tokharians, members of a so-called lost tribe of
Indo-Europeans known from later inscriptions.
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