The Lost Civilisation Of The Moche (Peru)

[Mighty_Emperor]

Interetsing Horison on BBC2 the other night:

Horizon

Thu 3 Mar, 9:00 pm - 9:50 pm 50mins

The Lost Civilisation of Peru

Two thousand years ago a mysterious and little known civilisation - the Moche - ruled the northern coast of Peru. They built huge pyramids, produced some of the most exquisite jewellery ever found, and founded an empire that lasted for hundreds of years. Then this extraordinary civilisation simply vanished.

Today, despite their great achievements, almost nothing is known about the Moche.

In the last few years scientists have returned to Peru to study the Moche, and they've made a number of crucial discoveries.

Horizon tells the story of the rise and fall of one of the greatest civilisations of the ancient world. It is an epic story of natural disasters and human sacrifice.

It is a story archaeologists have been trying to piece together for the last three decades. And now at last they have some answers. [With audio description]

More info:

www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/hor ... mary.shtml

Lost society tore itself apart

By Nick Davidson
BBC Horizon

Two thousand years ago, a mysterious and little known civilisation ruled the northern coast of Peru. Its people were called the Moche.

They built huge and bizarre pyramids that still dominate the surrounding landscape; some well over 30m (100ft) tall.

They are so heavily eroded, they look like natural features; only close up can you see they are made up of millions of adobe mud bricks.

These pyramids are known as "huacas", meaning "sacred site" in the local Indian dialect. Several contain rich collections of murals; others house the tombs of Moche leaders.

As archaeologists have excavated these Moche sites, they have unearthed some of the most fabulous pottery and jewellery ever to emerge from the ancient world.

The Moche were pioneers of metal working techniques such as gilding and early forms of soldering.

It enabled them to create extraordinarily intricate artefacts; ear studs and necklaces, nose rings and helmets, many heavily inlaid with gold and precious stones.

Archaeologists have likened them to the Greek and Roman civilisations in Europe.

But who were these extraordinary people and what happened to them? For decades the fate of the Moche has been one of the greatest archaeological riddles in South America.

Now, at last, scientists are coming up with answers. It is a classic piece of archaeological detective work.

'Mud burials'

This week's Horizon tells the story of the rise and fall of a pre-Inca civilisation that has left an indelible mark on the culture and people of Peru and the central Andes Mountains.

One of the first important insights into this remarkable culture came in the mid-1990s when Canadian archaeologist Dr Steve Bourget, of the University of Texas in Austin, made a series of important discoveries.

Excavating at one of the major Moche huacas - a site known as the Huaca de la Luna - he came across a series of dismembered skeletons that bore all the signs of human sacrifice.

He also found that many of the skeletons were so deeply encased in mud the burials had to have taken place in the rain.

Yet in this part of Peru it almost never rains; it could not have been a coincidence. Bourget speculated that the Moche, like many desert dwelling peoples, had used human sacrifice to celebrate or encourage rain.

The theory appeared to explain puzzling and enigmatic images of human sacrifice found on Moche pottery; it provided a new insight into Moche society; yet it did not explain why this apparently sophisticated civilisation had disappeared.

Then American climatologist Dr Lonnie Thompson, of Ohio State University, came up with a startling new find. Using evidence from ice cores drilled in ancient glaciers in the Andes, he found that at around AD 550 to 600, the coastal area where the Moche lived had been hit by a climatic catastrophe.

Internal collapse

For 30 years the coast had been ravaged by rain storms and floods - what is known as a Mega El Niño - followed by at least 30 years of drought. All the human sacrifices in the world would have been powerless to halt such a disaster.

It seemed a plausible explanation for the demise of a civilisation.

But then in the late 1990s, American archaeologist Dr Tom Dillehay revisited some of the more obscure Moche sites and found that they dated from after AD 650.

Many were as late as AD 750, 100 years after the climatic double-whammy. He also found that at these later settlements, the huacas had been replaced by fortresses.

The Moche had clearly survived the climatic disaster but had they then been hit by an invasion? Dillehay cast around but could find no evidence for this.

He now put together a new theory, one that, in various guises, is now widely accepted by South American experts.

The Moche had struggled through the climatic disaster but the leadership - which at least in part had claimed authority from its ability to determine the weather - had lost authority and Moche villages and/or clan groups had turned on each other in a battle for scarce resources such as food and land.

Moche society had pulled itself apart.

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Horizon is broadcast on BBC Two on Thursday at 2100 GMT.

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Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/s ... 311153.stm

Published: 2005/03/02 11:46:15 GMT

© BBC MMV

What I thought was odd (and it may have been a storytelling flourish to highlight the differences between the theory) but they seemed to assume that after the civilisation collapsed all the people would have disappeared. Granted they might not have been able to sustain high population densities but the revelation that they might have moved away from the coast (rather than just vanish) and that people in the region may share genes with the people of Moche didn't really strike me as awfull groundbreaking.

Despite that niggle it was a greta documentary and the finds were fantastic - still keeping some of their original colours. The end with footage of a similar ritual was fascinaitng - there was even a mother with her child on her back getting stuck in!! There was something similar ina previous documentary (Michael Palin) up in the Andes where they use slings and lumps of metal!!

[edit: And an interesting coincidence as the Spider Necklace was featued the other week as one of Dan Cruikshank's "Around the World in 80 Treasures".]

 

[alytha]

I watches it... it was quite cool although they kept repeating themselves..I got the idea about dry weather in the mountains and wet weather on the coast and vice-versa the first time, thanks...and they kept repeating filler-images like the two warrior guys and the floods...could have filled that space with some information.

I agree with the civil war theory, but I rather think that the people living in the stone-built town higher up were hit not quite as hard and had to face the population from the coast looking for a new home and just said; nope, we don't want you here. I think in the docu, they presumed that the towns in the mountains were built after the catastrophe.


Alytha

 

[sebastianp1]

Wasn't it the Moche that left all those pottery figurines depicting couples engaged in @nal intercourse? I seem to remember seeing an exhibition of such figurines many years ago. :shock:

 

[Jerry_B]

I think in the docu, they presumed that the towns in the mountains were built after the catastrophe.

IIRC, no they didn't - they got the idea from datable evidence from the mountain sites.

That said, there was the usual flourish of what seemed to be speculation in some areas - the whole 'knocking off the hat' game/ceremony seemed to be an idea rather than something borne out by facts.

I also think that when the word 'disappear' is applied to cultures or civilisations, it means that it has ceased to be as far as any major form of social organistion is concerned. This of course doesn't mean that the people that made up the Moche culture disappeared too - they probably just dispersed back into the melange of local meso-american cultures in that area.

 

[ramonmercado]

Tomb of a Powerful Moche Priestess-Queen Found in Peru

Discovery helps change ideas about the roles of elite women in Moche society.

A Moche princess queen and her funerary mask.
A funerary mask of copper is uncovered near the priestess-queen's skull.

Photograph courtesy Luis Jaime Castillo Butters
A. R. Williams
National Geographic
Published August 8, 2013

Some 1,200 years ago, a prominent Moche woman was laid to rest with great pomp and ceremony. Now archaeologists have uncovered her tomb along with clues that testify to her privileged status and the power she once wielded.

The discovery—made over the last couple of weeks at the site of San José de Moro in the Jequetepeque River valley of northern Peru—is one of several that have revolutionized ideas about the roles women played in Moche society.

In about A.D. 750 this revered woman was buried in a large chamber some 20 feet (6 meters) beneath the ground. The earthen walls of her tomb were painted red, and large niches held offerings of ceramic vessels. Two adults, presumably sacrificed female attendants, were buried with her along with five children. (See video of a Moche tomb.)

Her skeleton rested on a low platform at one end of the chamber and was adorned very simply with a bead necklace of local stones. Beside her lay an important clue to her identity—the kind of tall silver goblet that appears in Moche art in scenes of human sacrifice and blood consumption. Such vessels have only been found previously in the tombs of powerful priestess-queens, so that was likely the role this woman played in life.

The elaborate decoration of the coffin is another clue that this was someone important. The box itself was probably made of wood or cane, which has long since decayed. Copper plaques once covered it, tracing out a typical Moche design of waves and steps that's now visible to one side of the skeleton where the wall of the collapsing coffin fell flat.

Near the skeleton's head lay a copper funerary mask, which probably sat atop the coffin originally. And at the foot of the burial lay two pieces of copper shaped like sandals. "The coffin was anthropomorphized," explains excavation director Luis Jaime Castillo Butters. "It became a person." ...

The coffin must have been part of the show of a public funeral, as with famous people today. The deceased probably ruled one of the Moche communities nearby. During her funeral, her coffin—with a face and feet that represented the person inside—was carried to its final resting place in a grand procession that included an honor guard of warriors and musicians who played rattles, drums, whistles, and trumpets.

This is the eighth elite female burial to be found since excavations began at San José de Moro in 1991. The accumulating evidence has convinced archaeologists that the site was an important ceremonial and pilgrimage center between A.D. 600 and 850, and that the priestess-queens who were buried there played a large role in governing the political and spiritual affairs of the region—a huge shift in thinking about the structure of Moche society.

"Twenty-five years ago we thought that power was monopolized by male warrior-priests," says Castillo Butters, a professor of archaeology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and a National Geographic grantee.

Back then experts were influenced by discoveries like the tomb of the Lord of Sipán, a ruler who died at the age of 30 in about A.D. 250, at the height of the early Moche culture. His body was adorned in gold and buried in an elaborate mausoleum that also held human sacrifices.

Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva described this figure as a supreme monarch in his story about the tomb and its artifacts in the October 1988 issue of National Geographic magazine: "Accepting homage and tribute, performing priestly duties himself, and standing confidently at the apex of the social pyramid with absolute power of life and death over his subjects, he must have seemed like a demigod."

Additional finds made in recent years, however, have put women at the top of the Moche power structure as well. A tattooed female mummy, for example, unearthed at the site of El Brujo in 2005, was buried with traditional symbols of power such as massive ceremonial war clubs and nose rings with fierce designs—men carrying war clubs or heads pecked by condors. She also wore tokens of great wealth, such as her 15 necklaces made of lapis lazuli, quartz crystal, silver, and a gold-copper alloy. The archaeologists who uncovered her believe she was likely a warrior queen.

At San José de Moro, the evidence uncovered year after year seemed to suggest that power in that area was exclusively in the hands of women.

But in 2009 the tomb of a priest came to light. He was about 45 years old when he died, and he was buried with ornaments of gold-plated copper, necklaces of semi-precious stones, and a crown colored with the green patina of aged copper. Near him lay the remains of five other people, probably sacrificed to accompany their lord in death.

This site, then, with its elite burials of both genders, suggests that men and women alike filled positions of power in the neighboring communities.

The Moche, it turns out, did not have a centralized society, as once believed. They were more a loosely affiliated group of communities, each with its own ways of doing things. In this valley, it's likely that women were in charge of many of the communities and men were in charge of others. Those roles also carried over into the great beyond.

"The Moche seem to have believed that the identities that gave prominence to these individuals in life were to be maintained after death," notes Castillo Butters. "Accordingly, they imbued their burials not only with symbols of religion and power, but [also] with the artifacts and costumes that allowed the priest and priestesses to continue performing their ritual roles in the afterlife."

news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130808-moche-priestess-queen-tomb-discovery-peru-archeology-science/
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2013081...queen-tomb-discovery-peru-archeology-science/

 

[EnolaGaia]

A Moche temple mural that hasn't been seen in person in over a century has been re-discovered and excavated.

Archeologists Rediscover an Ancient Peruvian Fresco That Hasn't Been Seen In 106 Years

Archeologists have rediscovered a pre-Hispanic fresco depicting mythological scenes in northern Peru that they had only seen in black and white photographs that were more than a century old.

"It's an exceptional discovery, first of all, because it is rare to unearth wall paintings of such quality in pre-Columbian archeology," said Sam Ghavami, the Swiss archeologist who led excavations that uncovered the mural in October.

Ghavami spent four years looking for the rock painting, which he believes could be around 1,000 years old, with a team of Peruvian students.

"The composition of this painting is unique in the history of mural art in pre-Hispanic Peru" ...

The fresco forms part of the Huaca Pintada temple, which belonged to the Moche civilization that flourished between the 1st and 8th centuries, and venerated the Moon, the rain, iguanas, and spiders.

The uncovered mural is about 30 meters (98 feet) long, and its images in blue, brown, red, white, and mustard yellow paint remain exceptionally well preserved.

In one section, a procession of warriors can be seen heading toward a bird-like deity.

The painted images "appear to be inspired by the idea of a sacred hierarchy built around a cult of ancestors and their intimate links with the forces of nature" ...

The discovery is also unusual in that it shows a mixture of styles and elements of two pre-Incan cultures: the Moche and the Lambayeque, who lived on Peru's north coast between 900 and 1350 CE. ...

The mural's existence was only known via black and white photos taken in 1916 by the German ethnologist Hans Heinrich Bruning, who lived in Peru for many years.

However, treasure hunters destroyed a wall as they tried to loot the site, and "it was forgotten by the scientific community" ...

On top of that, no one even knew about the photos Bruning had taken until they were found in 1978.

"Since then, archeologists have known about Huaca Pintada, but no one came to excavate the site because they thought they would find nothing there."

As the years went on, thick foliage took over. ...

However, first, he had a long battle to obtain permission from the family that owns the land where the mural was found.

"It took me two years for them to let me dig and I had to try different ways to resolve the situation with the support of a shaman who works with the spirit of the shrine" ...

FULL STORY (With Photo): https://www.sciencealert.com/archeo...uvian-fresco-that-we-havent-seen-in-106-years