Team of international archaeologists finds letter in a lost language in Peru

A team of international archaeologists found the letter under a pile of adobe bricks in a collapsed church complex near Trujillo, 347 miles (560 km) north of Lima. The complex had been inhabited by Dominican friars for two centuries.

“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, told Reuters.

A photograph of the letter recently released by archaeologists shows a column of numbers written in Spanish and translated into a language that scholars say is now extinct.