WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Thousands of mummies, most of them from the Inca culture five centuries ago, have been unearthed from an ancient cemetery under a shantytown near Lima in Peru, National Geographic announced on Wednesday.

Believed to be the largest cemetery from one time period excavated in Peru, lead archeologist Guillermo Cock said as many as 10,000 Incas were possibly buried at the site at Puruchuco in Peru's Rimac Valley between 1480 and 1535.

However, Cock said the site was being destroyed at an alarming rate by "human progress" and most of the remains might never be recovered because archeologists could not get access to them.

Cock, who estimates they uncovered the remains of between 2,200 and 2,400 Incas, said the cemetery provided a huge scientific sampling of the Inca people from infants to the elderly and from the rich to the very poor.

"The mummies are starting to 'chat' with us, telling some amazing stories," Cock said in a statement released by Washington-based National Geographic Society, which funded his mission.

Some of the "mummy bundles" contained as many as seven people buried along with their possessions and weighed hundreds of pounds.

One of the bundles, dubbed the Cotton King, was made up of hundreds of pounds of raw cotton. Inside was the body of an Inca noble and a baby as well as 70 items including food, pottery, animal skins and corn to make a drink called chicha.

Among the most interesting discoveries were the number of elite members of Inca society, some of whom were still wearing the elaborate feather headdresses they were buried in.

FALSE HEADS

Another striking find was 22 intact and 18 disturbed "false heads," or falsas cabezas. These are mummy bundles with a bump on top filled with cotton and resembling a human head.

These bundles contain several people, one of them the key person and the remainder probably accompanying him in the afterlife. The bodies of adults are in the traditional fetal position, with their possessions arranged around them.

"Prior to our excavations, only one falsas cabezas bundle from the Inca Period had been recovered by an archeologist, in 1956," said Cock.

About 50,000 to 60,000 artifacts were retrieved from the site and some of these will be on display at a news conference later on Wednesday in Washington.

Cock, who has been conducting archeological work in Peru since 1983, said it would take years to analyze their findings. "This is a unique opportunity to study a period of time that is famous but yet about which little is known."

The Incas once ruled a vast swathe of South America stretching from Colombia to Chile but Spain's Francisco Pizarro and his band of 160 treasure hunters, using cannons and horses, brought that empire to a bloody end in 1533.

Cock and his team worked at a frenetic pace over the past three years to salvage as much as they could from the cemetery before the shantytown was leveled for development.

The site is known as Tupac Amaru by the 1,240 families who sought refuge there from 1989 after fleeing guerrilla fighting in the Peruvian highlands.

When excavation began, some of the mummies were found to have begun to decompose because of the tens of thousands of gallons of liquid, including sewage, dumped into the streets every day. Other graves were destroyed by bulldozers in 1998.

Shantytown dwellers fought to remain on the site and archeologists turned the area into a giant dig, building bridges for people to cross the streets. Some of the residents joined in the dig.

The excavation ended last July, and Cock said houses now cover most of the untapped areas. "Having to walk away is frustrating. What's left may have been a huge contribution to knowledge of the Inca."

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