Precious Jewelry
Photograph by Matthew Helmer, NG Grantee

Necklaces made of lapis lazuli, turquoise, quartz, and spondylus (a spiny oyster) shells adorned the nobles in the main chamber. Archaeologists have laid out the recovered beads in the order that they may have been originally strung.
The people who built this tomb followed the local practice of ancestor worship, digging three funerary chambers deep into a site that predated their culture by two millennia. "This tomb is a testament to the power that the ancestors had over Chimú-Inca nobility and Andean society at large," says Helmer.
Published December 2, 2013