In the hundreds of years since the Spanish landed in the New World and used their diseases to wipe out the native populations, untold numbers of indigenous languages have been lost among the sands of time. Among these is a language from northern Peru spoken by a tribe of fishermen. The language, known as Pescadora, has been referred to in Spanish writings from the colonial period, but never discovered. However, a lost language unearthed in a letter discovered by archaeologists might be the missing pescadora.
“Our investigations determined that this piece of paper records a number system in a language that has been lost for hundreds of years,” Jeffrey Quilter, an archaeologist at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, said of the discovered letter, which contains a row of mystery language with Spanish translations across from it akin to a translation dictionary. “We discovered a language no one has seen or heard since the 16th or 17th century.”
The letter was unearthed in the ruins of Magdalena de Cao Viejo, a lost church at the El Brujo Archaeological Complex near the city of Trujillo in northern Peru. The artifact was kept secret until the report was published in the journal American Anthropologist. It provides an incredible look into the pre-Conquest cultures of Central and South America.
Tags: lost languages, linguistics, ancient language discovered, lost indigenous language discovered, Trujillo, Peru, Jeffrey Quilter, Harvard, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Magdalena de Cao Viejo, language translation discovered in church ruins, archaeology, pescadora, El Brujo Archaeological Complex