Mummy dearist

Meet “Oqui Ópata”, who doesn’t look all that bad after spending the last 400 or so years holed up in a cave in the Sierra Madres Occidentales.

Ms. Ópata was probably a curandara, a natural healer, and among the last of her people,  who disappeared as an identifiable ethnic group soon after the Conquest. She was buried, together with the cremated remains of a baby, in a cave in Bavispe, Sonora, in what had been from about AD 700 to AD 1200 the ceremonial and cultural center of her people.  That she was buried in the cave suggests she was a highly regarded figure in a culture near the end of its existence.

Besides the textiles and ceremonial ceramics which show the survival of her culture long after it was thought to have disappeared, “Ópata Woman” (“Oqui” is the Ópata word for “woman”) the mummy is in good enough condition to allow for DNA testing.  The Ópata’s complete disappearance was due more to mestiaje (intermarriage) than genocide or disease, and DNA results may provide an answer to what happened to this particular strand in the Mexican cultural fabric.