Three pre-Columbian mummies that had been borrowed for the 1925 Universal Vatican Exposition and have since been stored at the Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum were returned to Peru by the Vatican on Monday.
The agreement was signed on October 17 by Cardinal Fernando Vergéz, president of the Governorate of Vatican City State, and César Landa, Peru’s minister of international affairs, making the repatriation of the remains official.
“The return could be carried out as was suitable thanks to the Vatican’s and Pope Francis’s good nature. I came here to sign the paper. They will arrive in Lima in the next weeks, the foreign minister of Peru informed the regional media.
The skeletal remains will be examined by the Vatican Museums to ascertain their time of origin, according to Vatican News.
The mummies were discovered in the Peruvian Andes at a height of 9,800 feet.
“I agree with Pope Francis that these mummies are more than just artifacts; they are real people. Human remains that must be properly interred in Peru, where they originally came from, according to Landa.
The Peruvian foreign minister had meetings in the Vatican with Pope Francis, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary for relations with states of the Holy See, Cardinal Paul Richard Gallagher, and Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
More than 80,000 artworks and artefacts may be found at the Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum.
The collection includes “thousands of prehistoric artifacts from all over the world dating from over two million years ago, to the gifts given to the current pontiff; from evidence of the great Asian spiritual traditions, to those of the pre-Columbian and Islamic civilizations; from the work of African populations, to that of the inhabitants of Oceania and Australia, and the indigenous peoples of America,” according to the museum’s website.