Scientists have unearthed an Inca-era tomb in the heart of Peru’s capital Lima, archaeologists said this week, a burial dug up under a working-class home and believed to hold noble remains wrapped in cloth alongside ceramics and fine ornaments.

Lead archaeologist Julio Abanto said the 500-year-old tomb contains “multiple funerary bundles” tightly wrapped in cloth.

He said the entombed were likely elites from the Riricancho society, a culture that once populated present-day Lima before the powerful Inca came to rule a sprawling empire across the length of western South America in the 1400s...