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Lima –  An archaeological discovery in the jungles of the southern portion of Cuzco province is forcing a revision of our knowledge about Peru's pre-Incan past.

The location of an ancient city in the Espiritu Pampa area means that the Wari civilization, which flourished from the sixth through 13th centuries, extended much farther south and east than had been thought, Peruvian Culture Ministry official Juan Julio Garcia told Efe on Thursday.

In addition, the initial studies done on the 362 artifacts found there to date, most of them from the tomb of what appears to be a dignitary already dubbed the "Lord of Wari," indicate that these people had contact with the Nascas, a civilization located across the Andes on the Pacific coast.

The funerary items found with the Lord of Wari consist of a mask and silver breastplate, two golden bracelets, four silver head feathers, 15 representations of faces in beaten silver, two palm wood scepters adorned with silver, three necklaces of semi-precious stones and 200 silver sequins.

Regrettably, Garcia said, high humidity in the jungle had made it impossible for any bones or textiles to be preserved in the tomb, the date of which is not certain but which experts think belongs to the early Wari epoch.

Along with this "main funerary context," archaeologists have found eight "secondary" graves, apparently of people who may have been sacrificed or perhaps buried later and which reflect what Garcia called a "pan-Andean pattern" of burial.

The remains were found in November, but they were not made public until the arrival in Cuzco city of the general director of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Irina Bokova, who is on an official visit to Peru.