Encyclopedia of the Incas

made one of their last public appearances in December 1533 for the investiture
of Manco Inca, one of Huayna Capac’s sons.
After Manco Inca’s failed siege of Cuzco in 1536, however, the mummies’
public appearances became more sporadic and, when Spanish officials declared
the cult idolatrous, their attendants took them into hiding. In 1559, the then
viceroy instructed Cuzco’s chief magistrate, Juan Polo Ondegardo, to put an
end to the idolatrous worship of the mummified ancestors and to find the
mummies, which had been concealed in and around the city. Within a few
months, Polo succeeded in discovering several mummies of Inca kings along
with their substitute statues (which ruling kings and queens had made of
themselves in wood, gold, or silver), as well as the mummified remains of
several queens. The fact that the mummies were accompanied by lavish
offerings, such as goblets of gold and other “treasure,” made their discovery
especially rewarding. Polo Ondegardo had some of the bodies secretly buried
and dispatched four mummies to Lima, where they went on display.
Before the mummies left Cuzco, however, the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega
saw them, and his account sheds some light on how the mummies may have
been prepared, “without the loss of a hair of the head or brow or an eyelash.” He
described how they were seated, dressed “as they had been in life,” with their
hands across their breasts and their eyes lowered. Another eyewitness, José de
Acosta, who saw them in Lima in 1590, wrote that Pachacuti’s body was so well
preserved that he appeared to be alive, and that it was covered with a certain
“resin.” Nevertheless, he did not discover how the body had been embalmed.
Garcilaso believed that the bodies had been taken above the snow line and kept
there until their flesh dried, after which they were covered with the “resin”
mentioned by Acosta. The chronicle of Juan de Betanzos provides a telling
clue. He noted that when Huayna Capac died in Ecuador the nobles who
accompanied him had the body opened, and removed the entrails, “preparing
him so that no damage would be done to him and without breaking any bone.”
Then he was “prepared” and “dried” in the sun and the air, dressed in “costly
clothes” (Betanzos 1996 [1551–1557]), placed on a litter adorned with feathers
and gold, and carried to Cuzco.
While no royal mummies have been discovered, Inca-period mummies
uncovered in tombs in the cloud forest of Chachapoyas in northern Peru provide
some insight into how the Inca royals may have been embalmed. Embalmers
controlled decomposition by emptying the abdominal cavity through the anus,
sealing the orifice with a plug of cotton cloth. Fly casings found in the mummy