• A temple tomb has been discovered in Peru that dates back to approximately 3,800 years ago, predating the rise of the Inca Empire.

• Archaeologists found four skeletal remains, all facing the mountains, the region’s water source.

• The discovery of pre-Inca burial remains sheds new light on the history of South America.

In the pre-Inca region of northwestern Peru, the worship of water is not difficult to understand. Although the area is in the Andes, it is also in a desert. This means that water from the mountains was an essential source of life.

The reliance on that source of life was enough to inspire a cult some 3,800 years ago. And archaeologists now know a little more about that time, thanks to the discovery of four skeletal remains—two children, a teenager, and an adult—in a temple associated with water worship.

Each of the bodies unearthed at Temple Queneto 2 at the Queneto archaeological site in Peru were laid on their sides, facing the mountains, according to a translated statement from the National University of Trujillo. The temple is known for its association with the water-centric cult, and the fact that they placed the bodies of their dead in a form of prostration toward their primary water source lends a lot of credence to the idea that they believed the nourishment they got from some good old-fashioned H2O wasn’t just physical.

The burial area included grave goods in the form of stone pendants and snail shells, decorum previously associated with the group, and pottery shards were found throughout the temple site

The temple is located in the Viru Valley of Peru and likely dates to sometime between 1800 and 900 BCE, known as the Early Formative period, before the mighty Inca Empire. The people who lived in the region were known for helping to start the craze for building large structures, including some of the earliest pyramids in the area. They also used ceramics in their construction.

The temple in particular is built with walls of cobblestones and clay plaster, with rounded corners.

“These environments,” Castillo Lujan, a professor at the university’s Professional School of Archaeology, said in a statement, “characterized by curved corners, show a unique architecture of the Early Formative period. In addition, fragments of early ceramics found at the site resemble those of other important settlements such as Gramalote, in the Moche Valley, and Huaca Negra, near the coast in the Viru Valley.”

The Viru Valley is known for its wealth of archaeological evidence of the region’s ancient civilizations. But locating a find from more than 3,800 years ago (the research team says this dig covered just 1 percent of the vast site’s total area) adds to the knowledge base from a time when there’s still relatively little burial information to draw on.

The research team hopes that the government will take these recent discoveries – and others in the archaeological field – as a call to transform the Viru Valley into “a benchmark for cultural tourism and a bastion of Peruvian identity.”

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