INCAN TOMB SURVIVES 600 YEARS WITHOUT BEING LOOTED

For about 600 years, every grave robber on the north coast of Peru walked past the Utzh An compound at Chan Chan and kept walking. The Inca conquered the place. The Spanish looted it. Modern shovel guys picked over the rest. Somehow all of them missed the one door that mattered, and on September 8 Peru's Ministry of Culture announced that archaeologists finally got through it. Jorge Meneses and his crew cleared sand from the entrance inch by inch, and about 16 inches in they put a flashlight through the gap and saw funerary bundles sitting untouched. Final count inside the platform: 38 people, quartz and shell jewelry, silver and copper plated necklaces, and a wooden chest holding 20 embroidered textiles covered in seabirds and monkeys. One of the two side chambers held no bodies at all. Just weapons and metal emblems. An entire room of swords and priceless metals, sealed for six centuries. One burial breaks the pattern. Chimú elites were laid to rest flexed or seated flexed, but this person was placed fully extended at the bottom of a chamber. Researchers are weighing two explanations, a sacrificial ritual or an enormous gap in rank, and they are careful to say neither is proven. Gabriel Prieto of the University of Florida, who was not on the dig, called it the discovery of the decade.

Why you should give a shit: Everything science knew about Chimú elite burials came from tombs that had already been stripped and scattered into private collections, so this is the first time the archaeologists get the whole story instead of whatever the looters couldn't carry.