Climate Change May Have Led to Earliest South American Mummies

posted on October 26th, 2012 in Archaeology, Chile, Peru, Peruvian Mummies

A 7,000-year-old mummy from the Chinchorro culture, along the border of Chile and Peru, whose skin, hair and clothing still remain (photos: National Geographic)

Changing Climate May Have Led To Earliest Mummies

NPR

August 15, 2012

A couple of thousand years before the Egyptians preserved some of their dead, a much simpler society made the first known mummies.

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The Uprising of Chile’s Mapuche Indians

posted on February 7th, 2010 in Chile, Indigenous Rights

Chilean Police Drag Mapuche Protester

Police arrest a woman who was demonstrating against the arrest of Mapuche Indians involved in a land dispute in Valparaiso, Chile, about 75 miles northwest of Santiago. Dozens of protestors marched through downtown Valparaiso on Dec 13, 2007 to pressure the government to release five Mapuche Indians. The Mapuche had been holding a hunger strike in the south of Chile after being arrested for starting forest fires on land belonging to a logging company whose land they are claiming by legacy.

Prosperous Chile’s Troubling Indigenous Uprising

Dec. 12, 2009

Time Magazine 

Compared to high-profile groups like the Quechua of Peru and the Yanomami of the Amazon rain forest, Chile’s Mapuche are a relatively obscure indigenous cohort in South America. But that has changed dramatically in recent months as a growing number of armed and masked Mapuche activists, pursuing a centuries-old claim to land they say was taken from them by the Spaniards and then the Chilean government, have engaged in a wave of arson attacks… (more…)

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