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00:01Beneath a pyramid in northern Peru, archaeologists uncover an ancient crypt and its astonishing secrets.
00:09It's incredible.
00:11Did this sacrificial victim demand to die?
00:14Who killed this man and threw him headfirst into a hole?
00:18Did this old woman send young men to grisly deaths?
00:22Was this one of her victims?
00:25The search for answers leads far beyond the grave.
00:30The end of the 18th century on the northern coast of Peru.
00:50For women, a time of fear.
00:54They're being arrested and interrogated by the dreaded Spanish Inquisition.
00:59The women say they don't understand the questions.
01:02They say they're simple peasants leading ordinary lives.
01:06But the Inquisitors see them very differently.
01:10Confiesce! Confiesce!
01:14They accuse them of unspeakable acts, transforming themselves into animals, having sex with the devil, even attempting murder with sorcery's black arms.
01:29And the women confess that they're witches.
01:33But the women won't confess.
01:37The Inquisition does its best to change their minds.
01:44Spain's witch hunters thought they were rooting out minions of Satan.
01:51But in fact, they'd stumbled on a long-forgotten mystery of the Americas.
01:56A secret far older and deeper than anything they or the women they were persecuting knew.
02:08Torture and prison couldn't reveal it.
02:11Perhaps archaeology can.
02:16Near the modern city of Trujillo, on Peru's northern coast, are the ruins of the largest mud brick structures ever built in South America.
02:29The Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Sun, and the Pyramid of the Moon.
02:38Not long after the time of Jesus, this desolate place was the center of a great civilization.
02:45And the home of thousands of people.
02:48No one knows their name.
02:54We call them by the name of a river that still flows through their ancient lands.
03:01Moche.
03:03The Moche flourished for some 800 years.
03:06They were neither the first nor the last civilization in Peru.
03:09But none was ever so brilliant.
03:18There are very few societies in the world who managed to pass the barrier of the simple political and economic complexity
03:27and become big civilizations.
03:30To create a high culture, let's say.
03:32The Moche were one of them.
03:34And what interesting is that they were one of the first ones here in Peru.
03:37But one achievement eluded the Moche.
03:41They were masters of metal and clay.
03:44But they never invented writing.
03:50Today, some of the world's top archaeologists spend their careers trying to read the riddle of the Moche's wordless world.
04:02The Moche were the Greeks of the Andes.
04:05Like the Greeks, they were geniuses at sculpting and painting.
04:10When we look at their ceramics, we see not just pottery, but sculptures, human faces, as though we're meeting real people.
04:18But because we can't translate these images, they remain mysteries, and we become fascinated with trying to unravel their message.
04:29I think that's why we're so fascinated by the Moche.
04:32July 2001.
04:33For over a year, Peruvian archaeologist Santiago Uceda, director of excavations at the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, has been excavating the ruins of a large private home beneath the Pyramid of the Moon.
04:52His earlier excavations here have uncovered multiple barriers.
04:58Now Uceda and his team are digging deeper, hoping the site might be a family crypt.
05:03A crypt would mean more tombs and more bodies.
05:14It isn't long before they find a human skeleton and a mystery.
05:20Well, here you've got a woman, a young woman. As you can see, the arm is flexed. She is lying very, very sweet, you know. She seems sleeping.
05:35This position is quite strange, you know, for a burial. So I think they arrange her.
05:41They arrange her.
05:43So she has her third molars in.
05:46Archaeologist Tania de la Bard shows the mysterious skeleton to John Verano of Tulane University in New Orleans.
05:54Dr. Verano is one of the world's greatest authorities on ancient Peruvian skeletons.
06:00He's analyzed hundreds of burials from the north coast.
06:03But even he's baffled by these bones.
06:07Unless someone dies in a very obvious way, like being beheaded, it's often very hard to tell how they died.
06:14My only guess is that she was perhaps strangled.
06:19By her position and lack of grave goods, I'd say she has to be an offering to someone else.
06:26If she was, she wasn't alone.
06:30Offering the living to the dead is a practice found throughout the world.
06:34It shocked the British in 19th century India, where the widows of dead rajahs willingly burned themselves to death on their husband's funeral pyres.
06:50In the 1920s, archaeologists excavating a Sumerian king's tomb in Iraq discovered more than 60 sacrificed servants.
06:58I often wondered when I was digging graves like this, you know, how nervous the household staff must have gotten when the old man was getting sick or if he had been wounded and you were thinking if he goes, well, I guess we go too.
07:12Spanish conquistadors didn't have to wonder.
07:19When they murdered the Inca Emperor Atahualpa in 1533, they saw with their own eyes what happened when a powerful man died in ancient Peru.
07:28When Atahualpa was killed by the Spanish at his funeral, his principal wife and a number of other servants showed up and said, make the grave bigger because we want to go with it.
07:42And they were prepared to die and go into the tomb.
07:45Perhaps because some women died willingly, ancient Peruvians may have found ways to ease their pain.
07:58By the examples I've seen of strangulation, they're killed in what I consider to be about the most gentle way that you could imagine.
08:06This looks a lot like a typical offering of a young woman, perhaps a wife, a concubine, a servant.
08:19They gave her a lot to drink and snuck up on her and she hardly even realized what happened.
08:25But if strangulation kills without a trace, can archaeologists be sure how this woman and others like her died?
08:33For decades they couldn't, until an astonishing discovery.
08:48This is the Moche pyramid called El Brujo, the sorcerer, 25 miles north of the Pyramid of the Moon.
08:55After Moche civilization collapsed around the year 800, later peoples buried their dead in the abandoned pyramid.
09:06The Peruvian desert mummified El Brujo's corpses and provided science with an archaeological smoking gun.
09:18In 1995, archaeologists digging at El Brujo discovered the burial of a man whose grave goods revealed his wealth and status.
09:33Underneath him, they found the body of a woman.
09:37If this woman had just been a skeleton found at the feet of the burial, I can assure you we wouldn't know the cause of death.
09:47We could have said, you know, it looks like she was sacrificed but there would be no physical evidence.
09:52But the woman had a cotton cord tied around her neck and there wasn't any doubt why it was there.
09:58She had relatively long shoulder length hair and you can just imagine the rope going around her neck like this and then being tied behind.
10:10And when they tied it behind, they caught some of her hair and it's still bound up in that knot itself and still bound to this rope.
10:18A thousand year old snapshot of details that normally would have disappeared over the years.
10:23I wouldn't be surprised if this woman felt she should accompany her husband to the grave.
10:35Corn beer was given to people during these rituals and perhaps she was a little bit inebriated and who knows may not even have noticed someone coming up behind her and all of a sudden strangling her.
10:53She was faced in the tomb and the grave was covered over and not discovered for another thousand years.
11:02In ancient Peru, human sacrifice could sometimes be an act of love.
11:12But not far from El Brujo, there may have been a very different kind of offering.
11:16These are the royal palaces of Chan Chan, only a few miles from the pyramids of the sun and the moon.
11:29In the 13th century AD, some 400 years after the end of the Moche, Chan Chan was the capital of an empire called Chimu and the largest city in South America.
11:40Some 20,000 people lived here, ruled by immensely wealthy kings.
11:47Chimu rulers lived their earthly lives behind these palace walls and their afterlives as well.
11:56They did not spend eternity alone.
12:01In 1971, archaeologists excavated a Chan Chan palace called Las Avispas, the wasps.
12:16They discovered a royal tomb surrounded by smaller burial cells.
12:20Looters had emptied the tomb, but not the cells.
12:23Inside those cells were huge jumbles of human bones.
12:29All of the skeletons seemed to be adolescent females.
12:33A hundred or more women being led to this platform, strangled and then placed in cells surrounding the principal burial.
12:40It's truly amazing and it's never been seen before in Andean archaeology or since.
12:46It suggests that if you were a Chimu ruler, you had some pretty impressive power, the ability to extract the lives of a hundred young women or more.
13:05I wonder how voluntarily they went.
13:08I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of anxiety in that crowd.
13:16They knew somebody was going to go with them.
13:18And when the finger pointed at them, I guess that would have been a moment.
13:22For me, anyway, it would have been a moment of great fear.
13:27Did the woman who looked so peacefully asleep go willingly to the tomb?
13:32Or was she forced into eternity?
13:35We'll probably never know.
13:43But the crypt has already revealed another skeleton.
13:46And these bones leave no doubt of a bitter struggle against a violent death.
13:54In the Moche Crypt below the Pyramid of the Moon, Santiago Uceda's team finds another human skeleton.
14:06Right away, it's clear that this one's death was anything but serene.
14:15It's a male. What's interesting is that he isn't buried like a Moche.
14:20The Moche buried their dead fully extended, lying on their backs.
14:23This person's bent nearly double.
14:31Well, here you've got the body of a young man lying in a very strange position.
14:37As you can see here, the feet with the legs who are flexed.
14:41Here his face is in the soil like this.
14:45He's down. And you can see the arms with his hand like this.
14:48And you can see the position of the bones.
14:51The hands are very stressed, you know.
14:53Probably he had a painful death.
14:56We don't know if it's a natural death or if he was killed.
14:58As Tanya prepares to lift the bones for transport to the lab, she makes a dramatic discovery.
15:07We were very surprised, you know, to meet the kneecap still in its side, still articulated.
15:13The kneecap reveals a crucial clue.
15:17Most Moche skeletons are found with the knee joints collapsed, suggesting that when the corpses were buried they had already begun to decompose.
15:26Archaeologists believe the Moche may have left the dead exposed for days before putting them in the ground.
15:36An intact kneecap hints that this man didn't have a funeral.
15:41He was probably killed and then they just put him in the hole and then immediately after they put the dirt.
15:48Whoever killed this man stuffed him head first into a hole that was too small for his body.
15:59Ironically, this humiliating treatment provides Tanya Delabarde with the most exciting discovery yet.
16:05We were very lucky, you know, because this part of the skull usually is not preserved.
16:12Because with the pressure of the sediment, it's broken.
16:15But here, this man was laying on his shoulder.
16:18You can see all the face preserved.
16:21So it's very good for us.
16:22It seems to be that it's a young adult and you can see there's no cavities on the teeth.
16:29The teeth are well preserved.
16:31So we think that this person eats well in his life.
16:35So maybe it helps us to understand that he came from a higher status.
16:38But revealing as these clues are, they only deepen the mystery.
16:48If this was a strong, healthy young man who led a privileged life,
16:53why was he buried without any grave goods reflecting his status?
16:57Why was he denied a proper burial ritual and stuffed head first into a shallow pit like so much discarded rubbish?
17:08In their forensics lab, Tanya Delabarde and John Verano pour over his bones,
17:14looking for even the tiniest clues to the riddle of his bizarre death.
17:19We can't find an obvious cause of death, like a blow to the head or a slashed throat.
17:27So we can only hypothesize, but he may well have been strangled.
17:32The fact that his hands were tightly clasped, and I really don't see that in burials normally,
17:39suggests that he was struggling at the moment of death.
17:43I've seen cases where autopsies where someone is being chased down an alley by someone else who's got a knife or a club,
17:53and they're finally caught.
17:56In that struggle, the hands were clenched in the last moment of life.
18:00Perhaps he was a captive.
18:02Perhaps he was an enemy traded or brought back from battle and thrown in as an offering,
18:11more the way you would kill an animal and throw it into a tomb.
18:13Why did this man die in such humiliating agony?
18:20It remains a secret of the moche.
18:23Traveling farther back into the moche past,
18:29some 150 years before the man was stuffed into a hole like an animal,
18:35and the woman arranged to look peacefully asleep.
18:37They detect what appears to be the outline of a burial chamber.
18:43Exquisite ceramics appear, another hint of an important tomb.
18:48One is especially brilliant, and especially intriguing.
18:58We don't know yet what he's holding in his hand.
19:02It looks to me like a shield.
19:04As we continue excavating, we'll uncover the whole pot.
19:10Then maybe we'll be able to discover who this person is.
19:21More digging reveals the statue.
19:24And a surprise.
19:25As we can now see after exposing the whole vessel, this is definitely a woman.
19:44In her right hand, she's holding something like a disc.
19:46This unknown object reminds us of a disc the moche used to make ceramics.
19:53So we think this may be the portrait of a female potter.
19:58Nearby, the team finds another ceramic figure.
20:03Although he's headless, this one's identity isn't in doubt.
20:06But everyone's surprised to find him here.
20:11This figure portrays a naked prisoner with his hands tied behind his back.
20:18We haven't found his face, but we can clearly see a rope fastened around his neck.
20:24When we excavate sites on the Pyramid of the Moon, it's very common to find vessels portraying naked prisoners.
20:35But it's very strange to find one in a tomb.
20:39To understand why we found a prisoner in this burial, we'll have to dig deeper.
20:44At the Trujillo Museum, Santiago Uceda examines the new finds.
20:51There's no doubt that the woman's portrait is a masterpiece.
20:57It's a very interesting piece.
21:01I'd even say enigmatic.
21:04Because what they're trying to represent here isn't some idealized figure, but an actual human face.
21:11This isn't an abstract image.
21:15It's the portrait of a real person.
21:19It's the face of a real person.
21:22But is it the face of a potter?
21:26Or could it be someone more important in the Moche world?
21:31Perhaps the naked prisoner is the clue.
21:34Following that clue will lead us to an incredible discovery.
21:37Beneath its dusty plazas lies a vast ancient city of the dead.
21:48Archeologists believe that some 1500 years ago, the Moche may have buried thousands of people at San Jose de Moro.
21:55Excavations have uncovered hundreds of graves here.
22:01Among them, one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made.
22:06At the beginning, we came from Christoph Verdonen, a professor from the University of Ucla, and I, who was a student at that time.
22:14We were looking for a very simple thing, a sort of small mystery.
22:18Because, for many years, both he and other people who investigated Mochica art and me,
22:27We were trying to find the origin of the ceramics of a very peculiar style, which is called Mochica-Tardio-Lineas-Fina.
22:34At UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History, archaeologist Christopher Donnan and artist Donna McClelland have pioneered techniques for drawing these baffling designs.
22:46Drawings that reveal mysterious scenes of Moche life, enigmatic clues to the Moche's long-lost world.
22:57The fine-line bottles are among the most complex artistic representations that we have from anywhere in the Americas.
23:11Moche fine-line painters had evolved the ability to paint very, very detailed scenes on the chamber of a ceramic vessel.
23:21And the complexity of those scenes is truly astonishing.
23:27One of the most astonishing scenes appeared to depict human sacrifice.
23:32On a fine-line pot in Peru's Rafael Larco Herrera Museum, warriors cut prisoners' throats.
23:39And elaborately dressed figures drank their blood.
23:43But so bizarre was this cast of characters that archaeologists wondered if what they were looking at was real,
23:49or imagined.
23:52You had individuals who looked human, but they were juxtaposed to individuals who were part bird and part human,
24:01or part fox and part human, or part bat and part human.
24:06So that the overall grouping at the sacrifice ceremony looked rather mythical.
24:12And we thought maybe this is just something that they thought was being enacted in a mythical realm.
24:23Then in 1987, archaeologists digging at a Moche pyramid near the village of Sipan
24:30stunned the world by discovering the richest unlooted burial ever found in the Americas,
24:35a Moche King Tut's tomb.
24:39Inside were the remains of a Moche Lord, dressed exactly like the man who drinks human blood in paintings of the sacrifice ceremony.
24:48Astonishment grew, and one year later, the Sipan excavators found the tomb of another man.
25:04His costume and emblems matched those of the priest who gives his lord the goblet of blood.
25:14But a third figure remained unknown.
25:19Its long braids and feminine costume led Dunnan and McClellan to speculate it was a woman.
25:25They called her the priestess.
25:29Despite her frequent appearance in Moche art, no one had found any evidence that she was real.
25:36And then, in 1991, Christopher Dunnan and his team began digging at San Jose de Moro.
25:45I really didn't think that we were going to find a tomb.
25:48I thought the possibility was pretty remote, but it was worth a try.
25:55And to my amazement, within two weeks, we were into one of the most spectacular tombs that we've ever found.
26:05At first, the excavators didn't know what to make of the strange artifacts they were finding in the tomb.
26:13But as they dug deeper, that began to change.
26:16As we were excavating these objects in this funeral chamber, the holes,
26:23all kinds of things that were inside the tomb,
26:26we realized that the person who was appearing was someone whom we knew.
26:31One of the students who worked with us in those years
26:35was the first to realize that the touch that we were found,
26:38the cup, etc., all the elements that were appearing,
26:42corresponded to a woman who appeared in the ark.
26:44But it was too soon to celebrate.
26:48Everything depended on proving the skeleton was indeed female.
26:53And that would not be easy.
26:56I began to take measurements of the bone.
26:59And there are cut-off points between males and females
27:03that under a certain size it's usually female,
27:07over a certain size it's usually male.
27:08Well, this person was pretty much on the border.
27:13They said, well, come on, come on.
27:15What is it? A man? Is it a woman? Is it a woman? Is it a man?
27:17And I said, I think it's a woman.
27:21Well, can't you be any more certain than that?
27:25And I said, I'm pretty sure it's a woman.
27:28But it's a big lady.
27:31The chance arrival of bone expert John Verano saved the day.
27:38He looked at my measurements and he looked at the bones and he said,
27:42it's a woman.
27:45So, I was delighted.
27:47And at that moment we knew we had the priestess.
27:50It was the richest female burial ever found in the Americas.
27:54And to archaeology, it was much more.
27:56At San Jose de Moro, the earth had yielded proof that one of the most important religious leaders of the Moche world was a woman.
28:11The astonishing finds at Sipan and San Jose de Moro proved that paintings of the apparently mythical sacrifice ceremony were really mirrors of Moche life.
28:22Could art also solve the mystery of the ceramic woman in the tomb?
28:33Santiago Uceda thinks it could.
28:38Another Moche painting seems to show the presentation of naked prisoners to a priest.
28:46From details of this and other paintings, it's clear the captive suffered.
28:51A grisly death.
28:55But it's a more obscure detail that sticks in Uceda's mind.
29:02Women sit with the prisoners.
29:04They seem to be instructing them.
29:06And offering them something from what appears to be a stone bowl.
29:10Or a disc.
29:11Uceda found the old woman clutching a disc only a few feet away from a portrait of a naked seated man.
29:21His hands bound like a prisoner's.
29:24Did the Moche deliberately put them together?
29:28Are they the same as the two figures depicted in art?
29:34Who Seda thinks they might be?
29:38Night falls on the Peruvian city of Chiclayo.
29:43And a timeless rite begins.
29:46Isabel Chingual Machado is a curandera, a woman healer.
29:55Curanderas offer to heal their patients of everything from cancer to business problems to unrequited love.
30:03To cure her patients, Isabel must bring them with her on a journey to the realm of the spirits.
30:12And just as it did thousands of years ago, the journey to the gods begins with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline,
30:21a natural ingredient of the venerable Andean cactus called Saint Peter.
30:27In Spanish, San Pedro.
30:30Saint Peter is known as the saint who carries the keys to the kingdom, the keys to heaven, the keys to access that sacred world.
30:41And Saint Peter the cactus, San Pedro the cactus, has the same significance of allowing the healer and patients
30:51access to those other worlds and to the sacred.
31:02Fifteen minutes after I've taken San Pedro, I no longer feel like a normal person.
31:08When the vision comes, it's not like my imagination.
31:12It's like I'm seeing the way things really are.
31:15If I'm looking at something or at a person, I see the truth about them.
31:19It's not a hallucination. It's real.
31:25Fifteen hundred years ago, Moche artists created portraits of curanderas holding pieces of San Pedro.
31:36In the 21st century, Isabel prepares it in her household shrine, watched by Catholic saints, surrounded by objects that were holy long before Christianity came to Peru.
31:49Among these sacred objects, one catches Bonnie's eye, a stone disc.
31:59This disc came to Isabel from an ancient tomb, which is very significant, considering that we see a representation of a disc associated with a female in the Moche tomb.
32:11Back in Trujillo, Santiago Uceda puts his theory to another test.
32:20He shows the old woman to Douglas Sharon, director of the San Diego Museum of Man and one of the world's greatest experts on sacred healing in Peru.
32:29Sharon's reaction is just what Uceda hoped it would be.
32:37In my opinion, this is the most significant ethno archaeological find in at least 30 years in the Moche area.
32:48It's once-in-a-lifetime event. I don't expect anything else like this to occur in my professional lifetime.
32:57This woman holding the disc is right in the middle of very important rituals that we're beginning to be able to understand and interpret in Moche iconography.
33:06They were rituals of death.
33:12Moche art is filled with scenes of battling warriors, but in these combats, no one ever dies.
33:18Instead, victorious warriors capture their opponents by grabbing their hair.
33:23They strip their captives of their arms and armor and proudly display them before priests cut their throats, drink their blood, and dismember them.
33:37Some archaeologists believe that these Moche warriors weren't fighting against foreign enemies, but each other.
33:43Everyone knew that the losers would die. Their blood offered to the gods to ensure their own people's survival.
33:58For Moche prisoners, this may have been the threshold of eternity.
34:03Centuries ago, this small whitewashed room atop the pyramid of the moon may have been a holy shrine where Moche curanderas calmed the fears of those about to die.
34:18We must imagine this room as it was in Moche times, covered with a roof, almost in darkness, a highly dramatic atmosphere.
34:29Here, the woman would receive prisoners and give them San Pedro.
34:49I think it's clear that the woman in the Moche tomb who's holding this disc is a confessor, a priestess confessor,
34:54preparing a prisoner for his death and taking all of the offenses, impurities of that prisoner's life and making them right with the world, the cosmos.
35:15San Pedro gave the Moche curandera the power of the earth and the power of the stars.
35:20Guided by San Pedro, she purified the prisoner so he could be sacrificed.
35:27After the doomed man was purified, and after she'd made all of her offerings to the earth and to the stars, she gave the prisoner to his executioners and said,
35:36Here he is. Do as you will.
35:38Beginning about the year 600, a series of natural disasters brought the mighty Moche to their knees.
35:54Heavy rains and terrible droughts destroyed their once abundant food supply.
35:58Today, we call this destructive weather pattern El Niño.
36:05But to the Moche, it was a sign that their divine ancestors were displeased.
36:11They tried pleasing them with human blood.
36:13But they failed.
36:19By 700 AD, famine may have turned the Moche's brilliant world into a nightmare.
36:25But we are in a situation that, in some way, is similar to what is happening with Somalia today.
36:30It is to say, each of these peoples has become a kind of small fortress with a military leader, right?
36:37Who is in control of everything and has a small army of vándalos.
36:42It may not be coincidence that the tomb of the priestess dates from this period.
36:49Perhaps the final crisis of the Moche world catapulted her to the pinnacle of power.
36:55In late Moche art, the two male figures who once dominated sacrifice scenes have mysteriously disappeared.
37:02A new image shows the priestess sailing alone on a reed boat filled with jars of blood.
37:13Perhaps she offered blood to the gods of the sea,
37:17the only source of food now that flooding and droughts had destroyed the Moche's crops.
37:24There was a time in the early 8th century when a woman was all-powerful on the north coast of Peru.
37:32What I find, another thing I find very interesting, though, is she didn't last.
37:37The males took over again.
37:40After the Moche, a series of male-dominated empires conquered the north coast of Peru.
37:49First the Chimu, about 1200 A.D.
37:52Then in the 15th century, the Inca.
37:54And in 1533, from far across the ocean came the most powerful and oppressive empire of them all.
38:07The Spaniards arrived with a very firm set of ideas about women as witches, and these Peruvian women were forced to admit their congress with the devil, or to endure prison deprivation, malnutrition, torture, until they did.
38:33Not until the 20th century could northern Peru's Curanderas openly practice their ancient rites,
38:41thanks to the courage of the persecuted generations who refused to let them die.
38:47Today, their descendants are once again filled with the power of their Moche ancestors.
38:58The power of a healer is the greatest in the world.
39:02There aren't any words to describe it.
39:03I cure so many people, I give myself to my patients, and I feel so useful.
39:10Helping others is very grand, very sacred, very beautiful.
39:18These living women are the heirs of the great Moche women of the past.
39:26Could one of those women be buried in the crypt?
39:28The archaeologists are nearing the bottom of the tomb, but the deeper they dig, the more mysteries they will find.
39:39When they began excavating the Moche tomb, Santiago Uceda and his team found the mysterious ceramic portrait of a woman who may have been a powerful spiritual leader.
39:54Six weeks later, they're nearly finished.
39:58They've exposed the walls of the burial chamber, decorated with a row of deep niches.
40:04Inside these niches, more masterpieces in clay.
40:12So many, the diggers pause to count them.
40:17Among this astounding ceramic harvest, the team finds new portraits of the holy and the bazaar.
40:36And just when the archaeologists think they've seen everything, they uncover the most beautiful and strangest pot of all.
40:44It's a very rare piece, the first one we've found in 11 years of digging.
40:52This person's nose and upper lip are horribly mutilated, and he's in the praying position.
40:58How can we explain this? Possibly as a punishment?
41:01But it's also possible that in ancient Peru, holy men and women deliberately disfigured themselves
41:07to give their faces a look of extraordinary suffering or anger.
41:12Just imagine the fear they must have inspired among their own people.
41:16Imagine how they must have controlled other people's minds.
41:20It would have been amazing.
41:21To Seda, these astonishing ceramics are strong evidence he's excavating the tomb of a religious leader.
41:34But who?
41:38The mutilated holy man?
41:44The woman healer?
41:48A powerful priest who once cut prisoners' throats atop the Pyramid of the Moon?
41:59Who Seda's team is only inches away from finding out?
42:05Human bones appear.
42:07But they're strangely jumbled and incomplete.
42:12A large femur or thigh bone, but no pelvis and no skull.
42:18Only a piece of the lower jaw.
42:21The team is puzzled, but not nearly as puzzled as they are the next day,
42:26when at long last they strike sterile desert soil.
42:30Finding undisturbed soil means they've dug below the floor of the burial chamber.
42:35But there's no one buried there.
42:39Among the crew there's disappointment, but Santiago Uceda finds the empty tomb intriguing.
42:53Christians revere the bones of saints.
42:56The moche may have done the same.
43:01They may have looted the bones for their spiritual power.
43:05If a priest or a holy person was buried here, their bones have a spiritual power other people's bones don't have.
43:15If I dig up this holy person's bones, I can rebury them in other tombs to be guardian spirits and spirit guides.
43:23If I put those bones in the tomb of someone else, who's just died, it can be for only one reason.
43:33To guide the dead person's soul along the path to eternity.
43:37To guide the dead man.
43:38Who says the would that?
43:39to be the dead man.
43:40the dead man.
43:41Who says the suspect that the mysterious jumble of bones may be all the looters left of the holy person buried in the tomb.
43:44The bones don't tell him much.
43:58jaw holds worn teeth, hinting at someone perhaps 30 to 35 years old. The robust femur looks
44:05like a man's, but so did the leg bones of the priestess at San Jose de Moro. The pelvis
44:17and the skull are missing, so it's nearly impossible to determine age and sex. After
44:24tantalizing the archaeologists with so many dazzling artifacts, the tomb refuses to surrender
44:33its ultimate secret. In the crypt below the Pyramid of the Moon, the archaeologists cover
44:46the empty tomb. They'll study its bones and ceramics in their lab to see what further secrets
44:52they might reveal. Soon they'll be back to search the crypt for more tombs.
45:10And as archaeologists ponder the enigmas of Peru's past, that past lives all around them.
45:17On the 1st of November, the day of the dead, the people of the North Coast drink and dance
45:27at the tombs of their ancestors, just as the moche did 2,000 years ago.
45:38And night after night, Peruvians still seek out the curandera's ancient healing rites.
45:45The leafs a mighty empire could not crush. A legacy of timeless power. Descended from long-lost rituals
45:52of blood. A mystery we are only beginning to understand.
45:59A mystery we are only beginning to understand.
46:05A mystery we are only beginning to understand.
46:11A mystery we are only beginning to understand.
46:18A mystery we are only beginning to understand.
46:22A mystery we are only beginning to understand.
46:24A mystery we are only beginning to understand.
46:26A mystery we are only beginning to understand.
46:30A mystery we are only beginning to understand.
46:35A mystery we are only beginning to understand.
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