The long, lonely dirt road that steers off the highway from Nazca to Chauchilla, Peru, heads straight into low hills on the horizon, crossing a vacant, almost lunar landscape.
It’s difficult to imagine a city, town, or even village thriving amidst the heat and desolation.
The people who called this region home--the culture that etched the Nazca lines across the nearby desert plano--left the world with little mystery as to how they cared for their dead.
After death the bodies of their loved ones were tightly wrapped in finely embroidered cotton. Then, after being coated with a resin, they were placed into stone tombs just beneath the surface of the ground. Grave offerings were stored beside them, possibly in anticipation of their usefulness in the next realm.
Centuries later, their bleached white skeletal remains sit arranged on floors of the uncovered plundered tombs, many with hair still attached, some with long flowing dreadlocks displayed on the inside walls.The arid desert may have protected the bodies from time and decay, but not from the destruction of los guaqeros--the grave robbers. Over the years, poles were stuck into the ground to locate the tombs. Once found, anything thought to be valuable was plundered. Mummies were usually ripped apart in the search.
Amidst the broken pot shards and litter a scene more fitting for forensic anthropologists than tourists: fragments of ribs, shoulder blades and skulls lay strewn in every direction across the gray desert floor. 
Now the site is guarded, albeit not heavily. The remains continue to stare emptily back at us few tourists that shuffle by, almost seeming to heartily grin at the expanse of time that has brought us together, and alsoreminding us of our own mortality which often goes under appreciated...
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