Inti : Inca Sun God

NATIONAL GEO has a great documentary Inca Mummies: Secrets of the Lost World over at hulu. The Inca carved their civilization out of the Andes Mountains which at its height reached over 1400 miles along the coast of the Pacific.

Part of the modern mind-set, shown in this documentary, has to do with rediscovering things which, through a brutal history, have been lost or killed off before gaining an intimate knowledge of what they were. Later on we come of find that the intrigue in viewing different ways in which people create their own realities through culture is much more fasinating than extinguishing that culture and replacing it with your own. Understanding is the rhetoric of compassion.

In modern day Peru the poor community of Tupac-Amaru lives among the ruins of an Inca civilization. Tupac Amaru was the last indigenous leader of the Inca Empire. I'm not sure if this community is built on the same ground in which the Inca took their final stand against the Spanish. In the community of Tupac-Amaru there are mummified Inca elite buried just below much of the shanty-city. Guirremo Kauc, excavation leader trying to save these pieces of history had this to say: "Archaeological excavation is reconstructing the past by pieces, like a puzzle. There are a million of pieces that we have to put together. With every bone with every mummy we find a living person comes back to life."