An Ancient Peruvian Language

Jay Quilter, the William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum, recently revealed an ancient letter penned by an unknown Spanish author and lost for four centuries. The battered piece of paper was pulled from the ruins of an ancient Spanish colonial church in 2008, but a team of scientists and linguists has only recently revealed the importance of the words written on the flip side of the letter.

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is a museum affiliated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the oldest and largest museums focusing on anthropological material, with particular focus on the ethnography and archaeology of the Americas. Quilter, who has been the Peabody Museum’s deputy director for curatorial affairs, curator for intermediate area archaeology, and senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, revealed the importance of the revealed writing he found while excavating the letter was found during excavations of the Magdalena de Cao Viejo church at the  El Brujo Archaeological Complex in northern Peru, where the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News, has sponsored fieldwork at the site in the past.
    Prior to his arrival at the Peabody, Quilter, had spent 10 years as the director of pre-Columbian studies and curator of the pre-Columbian collection at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. His discovery of a lost language, written on a small piece of paper 400 years ago and excavated at a colonial-period site in Peru. “It is just one of hundreds of historic papers recovered at the site, which has been well preserved by the extremely arid climate—and also by the church's collapse.”
    On the back note, the original 17^th-century author of the letter had translated Spanish numbers—uno, dos, tres—and Arabic numerals into a mysterious language never seen by modern scholars. As Quilter stated: "Even though [the letter] doesn't tell us a whole lot, it does tell us about a language that is very different from anything we've ever known—and it suggests that there may be a lot more out there."
    The writing is a collection of translations from Spanish names of numbers and Arabic numerals (4 – 10, 21, 30, 100 and 200) with an unknown language. Some of the translated numbers had never been seen before, others may have been borrowed from the Quechua language, or related fields. Quechua is still used today in Peru, as well as Spanish, but in the early 17th century, many languages were spoken in the region, such as Quingnam and Pescador. Information about them today is limited. Nevertheless, archaeologists were able to conclude that the language of the speakers had lost a decimal system like ours.

The Santa Magdalena de Cao, Viejo  at El Brujo Archaeological Complex in the Chicama Valley

Since 2002, Quilter has been working in cooperation with Peruvian archaeologists at the El Brujo Archaeological Complex in the Chicama Valley. Currently he directs a multi-disciplinary study of a 16th-17th century colonial town and church complex, Santa Magdalena de Cao, Viejo, about 10 minutes east of the El Brujo Archaeological Complex, an archaeological site along the Moche Route that houses the Museum of Cao, home of the pre-Inca ruler, Lady of Cao. The church served a nearby town once inhabited by indigenous people forcibly relocated to the site by Spaniards, probably for purposes of conversion to Christianity.
    The tantalizing fragment is just one of hundreds of historic papers recovered at the site, which has been well preserved by the extremely arid climate—and also by the church's collapse. Fortunately for us today, but a huge misfortune for the early Spanish of the mid-to-late 17th century—the paper were trapped in the library or office where they kept their papers, enabling us today the discovery of the new language and an understanding of the diversity of cultures in early colonial Americas.
    Plans are currently underway to expand this research to examine long-term human-environmental relations in the Chicama Valley. It was also considered that the newfound native language may have been borrowed from Quechua, a language still spoken by indigenous peoples of Peru. However, Quilter claims it was clearly a unique tongue, and likely one of two known only by the mention of their names in contemporary texts: Quingnam and Pescadora—"language of the fishers."
    Also, the writings include translated numbers, which means that the lost language's numerical system was a ten-based, or decimal system—like English.

The letter found at Magdalena Cao shows a column of numbers in Spanish and translated into a language that scholars say is now extinct

Discovery of the lost language is described in the September issue of the Journal American Anthropologist. The research is detailed in the cover story, which in brief states that sometime in the early 17^th century, at Magdalena de Cao, a community of resettled native peoples in the Chicama Valley on the North Coast of Peru, a Spaniard used the back of a letter to jot down the terms for numbers in a local language, with numbers representing letters, referencing the local language, which is now lost.
    Four hundred years later, Jeffrey Quilter, who has conducted investigations in Peru for more than three decades, and is director of the archaeological project at Magdalena de Cao Viej,o and his associates were able to recover and study this piece of paper which turned out to be written in an unknown language (Jeffrey Quilter, et al., “Traces of a Lost Language and Number System Discovered on the North Coast of Peru,” Journal of American Anthropologist, vol.112, no.3, September 2010, pp357-369).
    The combined research team of U.S. and Peruvian archaeologists at the site within the El Brujo Archaeological Complex has found evidence of an unknown language and an unknown language that offers “a glimpse of the peoples of ancient and early colonial Peru who spoke a language lost to us until this discovery.”
    The writing is a set of translations from Spanish names of numbers (uno, dos, and tres) and Arabic numerals (4–10, 21, 30, 100, and 200) to the unknown language. Some of the translated numbers have never been seen before, while others may have been borrowed from Quechua or a related language. Quechua is still spoken today in Peru, along with Spanish, but in the early 17th century, many languages were spoken in the region, such as Quingnam and Pescadora. Information about them today is limited. Even so, the archaeologists were able to deduce that the lost language speakers used a decimal system like our own.
    “The find is significant because it offers the first glimpse of a previously unknown language and number system,” says Quilter. “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.”

The Quingnam language spoken in northern coastal Peru

The name of the lost language is still a mystery. The American-Peruvian research team was able to eliminate Mochica, spoken on the North Coast into the Colonial Period but now extinct, and point to Quingnam and Pescadora as possible candidates. Neither Quingnam nor Pescadora, however, have been documented beyond their names. There is even a possibility that Quingnam and Pescadora are the same language but they were identified as separate tongues in early Colonial Spanish writings, so a definitive connection remains impossible to establish.
    For us, it should be is interesting that toward the end of the Nephite period, Moroni stated: “The Lord knoweth the things which we have written, and also that none other people knoweth our language; and because that none other people knoweth our language, therefore he hath prepared means for the interpretation thereof” (Mormon 9:34).