Colombia Calling - Living And Working In Colombia

In today’s episode, Emily Hart speaks to archaeologist Daniella Betancourt: the woman decoding the enigma of Colombia’s mummies. Mummification is a practice which has been carried out all over the world, from Chile to China – from the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to Vladimir Lenin and Evita Perón, and - though chronically understudied - right here in Colombia too. These preserved remains are, Daniella tells us, a perfect time capsule: bodies frozen in time, they give us all sorts of clues about the ways people lived, and their beliefs about life and death. With the National University of Colombia, Daniella has been studying a collection of 36 mummies found in various institutions, trying to work out who they were, who mummified them, when - and why. Because until now, there has been so little study of this practice in Colombia, there’s still an awful lot find out, not least because these mummies were created by indigenous communities whose histories and customs were interrupted and erased by the Spanish colo