Letter of an ancient language.

• Author: Hardman, Chris
• Position: !Ojo!

Four hundred years ago in a small town on the coast of Peru, a Spanish priest used the back of a letter for scrap paper. This simple act--recording a list of numbers and words--would excite scientists in the 21st century when they realized they had evidence of a language that had been lost to the world for four centuries. The letter was recovered from a pile of rubble trapped under a collapsed church at El Brujo Archaeological Complex in northern Peru.

"The find is significant because it offers the first glimpse of a previously unknown language and number system," says Dr. Jeffrey Quilter, Deputy Director of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. "It also points to the great diversity of Peru's cultural heritage in the early colonial period. The interactions between natives and Spanish were far more complex than previously thought."

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When the Spaniards came to Peru in 1532, they had to navigate a landscape with multiple languages and cultures. Of those diverse languages only Quechua--the language of the Inca--survives today. "We know from Spanish accounts that there was a language that was referred to as Pescadora [of the fisher people] and there was another language that was referred to as Quingnam but we don't have any words for it," says Quilter. "As a matter of fact, we don't even know if Quingnam and Pescadora were the same language or not." Quilter, who has studied ancient civilizations in Peru for more than 30 years, speculates that the language found on the piece of paper is either Quingnam or Pescadora.

The letter was recovered along with hundreds of other historic papers among the rubble of a...