Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, ruled over a vast terrain that stretched along the Pacific Ocean from Ecuador to Chile. After winning the crown in 1532 through a bitter civil war with his brother after their father's death, he was ambushed and executed by the Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro. Although puppet Inca rulers were subsequently established, the independent Inca empire was extinguished, and Atahualpa's burial place was never discovered.
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But now an Ecuadoran researcher believes that she has found Atahualpa's tomb. Working with the French Institute of Andean Studies, Tamara Estupiñán Viteri has identified a site in the Andes mountains, about 40 miles south of Quito, Ecuador, as the emperor's tomb, Le Journal des Arts reports. The discovery of the ruins is the result of 10 years of research, and the excavations will begin in June, funded by Ecuador's National Institute of Cultural Heritage.
Estupiñán Viteri and her team discovered an architectural complex at an altitude of 3,350 feet in the Andes mountains. It contains several rooms and includes an ushno, a layered pyramid, supporting a throne — structures linked to the cult of ancestors. "It's important to point out that in Ecuador as well as in Peru, no one has found an Inca king's tomb until now," Estupiñán Viteri told ARTINFO France in an email. She thinks that the site was constructed after Atahualpa's execution "to hide him from the Spanish conquistadors who were desperately searching for things accompanying the corpse, that is, his personal belongings or a small treasure." If this is true, then the excavations this summer could very well lead to groundbreaking discoveries about Inca civilization.