Protecting mummies

last updated 8 January 2015

Salta, Argentina

Protesters are trying to block Argentina from putting the frozen remains of three Incan children in a museum, saying the mummies are so perfectly preserved it would be ghoulish to display them, The Washington Post reported this week. Argentine officials say it’s their duty to share the find, but the leader of the Indigenous Association of Argentina said the display would turn “something spiritual into something commercial.” Archaeologists believe the children—two girls and a boy—were left to freeze to death 500 years ago on a 22,000-foot peak, as a sacrifice to a mountain god. In 1996, a frozen Incan mummy known as Juanita was displayed in the U.S. It was so well-preserved that then-President Bill Clinton joked, “If I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out.”