The Ancient Chullpa of Peru

Illustration of two round chullpas at Sillustani. Funerary towers such as these were built as tombs, and serve to mark the landscape for the individual inside. Illustration by Ephrain George Squier.[1]

Where do we go after we die? This question has been on our minds since pre-history, and we’ve come up with myriad stories and strategies to address it. One interesting example of this is the chullpa, pictured above. A chullpa is an ancient above-ground tomb built of stone or adobe, constructed by the Aymara people. They can be as tall as 12 m (40 ft), and the most famous examples are found at Sillustani, near the city of Puno in Peru. The Aymara were a pre-Inca people indigenous to present-day Peru, and these structures give us a window into Aymara culture and their relationship with verticality.

As tombs, the main function of a chullpa was to signify the importance of a certain individual or family after death. In the natural circle of life, our bodies return to the Earth after we die. As such, we associate the place below the Earth’s surface with birth and death, so our attempts to achieve verticality are a way to delay this inevitable fate. One method we use is to construct above-ground tombs so our bodies don’t return to the Earth after we die. That’s what the chullpa represent: an attempt to set apart certain people who were too important to be buried beneath the surface with the rest of us. Put simply, their resting place is above the rest of us. Similar structures include the Egyptian Pyramids and various mausoleums around the world.

Illustration of two square chullpas at Acora. Funerary towers such as these were built as tombs, and serve to mark the landscape for the individual inside. Illustration by Ephrain George Squier.[2]

We know the chullpa were only built for important Aymara individuals or families because of the work required to build one. Building a structure like this requires a considerable amount of wealth, work and time, above and beyond the needs of mere survival. Something important was going on here. The Aymara must have believed in an afterlife based on verticality, and they put great amounts of effort into achieving it. Another connection with verticality was the orientation of the chullpa themselves. Each chullpa had a small opening on one of the four sides at its base, and nearly all of these openings were placed on the east side, facing the rising sun.[3] This connection between the structure and the sky means the Aymara correlated the sky with the afterlife in some way.

Plan and section illustrations of a round and square chullpa. As the drawings show, each contains an interior space with a small opening at the base. Illustrations by Ephrain George Squier.[4]

As with most structures of this nature, the chullpa weren’t the only type of ancient tombs found in Peru. Pictured below is an older type of tomb, or sepulchre, from the region. Each of these structures was meant to mark the landscape for a person or group of people after death, and each required quite a bit of time and effort to construct. This earlier version is intriguing in that it resembles other ancient megalithic structures from around the world, such as a dolmen, or sites such as Stonehenge. As such, the types of questions that the Aymara were trying to address were indeed on the minds of our ancestors all over the world.

An earlier version of a tomb, or a sepulchre, from Acora. These structures weren’t as sophisticated as the chullpa, but they served the same function. Illustration by Ephrain George Squier.[5]

A square chullpa at Aymará perched on a hilltop, overlooking a hill fort at Escoma. The builders were using verticality to show the importance of the chullpa. By placing it on a hilltop, it becomes more visible to the surrounding landscape and is more important as a result. Illustration by Ephrain George Squier.[6]

Structures like these tie back to the menhir, which is an upright megalith, or large stone, placed on the landscape. These stones represent the human body, with their upright posture and defiance of gravity. The chullpa accomplish this, but take it a step further by housing the actual resting place of a body. They act as a statement of importance and permanence, and prevent an individual or group of individuals from an underground burial after death. These individuals’ bodies continue to exist above ground with the rest of us, and they put in lots of time and effort to make it so. Such is our need for verticality.

View of the hill fortress at Quellenata. Various chullpa can be seen throughout the site, marking the landscape for the individuals whom they were built for. Illustration by Ephrain George Squier.[7]

[1]: Squier, E. George. Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877. 378.

[2]: Squier, 352.

[3]: Martiarena, Laurie M. “The social life of death: mortuary practices in the north-central Andes, 11th-18th centuries.” PhD diss., Norwich: University of East Anglia, 2016.

[4]: Squier, 353.

[5]: Squier, 351.

[6]: Squier, 373.

[7]: Squier, 387.