Moche (Mochica)

Two pyramids on the plain

formationDrafted from Kroeber, Archaeological Explorations in Peru, Part I: Ancient Pottery from Trujillo (1926)

A few kilometers from the Pacific, on the southern edge of the valley that takes its name from the same river, two great earthen structures rise from a dry plain between the conical hill called Cerro Blanco and the water's edge. The larger, the Huaca del Sol, stands free of the hillside, its bulk somewhat recalling the pyramids of Teotihuacan though less high and less steep; the smaller Huaca de la Luna is built as a terraced platform directly against the lower slope of the Cerro itself. Neither name - Sun, Moon - is likely original to the people who built them.

Kroeber, Archaeological Explorations in Peru, Part I: Ancient Pottery from Trujillo (1926) · PsamatheM · CC BY-SA 4.0

Uhle's excavations

The site takes its modern name, and the whole ancient culture along with it, from the nearby town of Moche. It was here that Max Uhle excavated for the University of California in 1899, working chiefly in the great cemetery that spreads across the sandy slopes behind the Huaca de la Luna and around both sides of the Cerro Blanco. The pottery he recovered - overwhelmingly red-surfaced, ranging from coarse utilitarian wares to finely modeled and painted vessels - became the type collection against which everything else found on this stretch of coast would afterward be compared. Even today, a visitor can pick sherds from the same red pottery off the plain between the two pyramids without much difficulty, evidence of just how thoroughly this ground was once occupied.

Art Institute of Chicago · Kroeber, Archaeological Explorations in Peru, Part I: Ancient Pottery from Trujillo (1926) · Daderot · CC0

A revolt of the artifacts

peakDrafted from Kroeber, Archaeological Explorations in Peru, Part II (1930)

In 1910 the German scholar Eduard Seler noted a wall painting inside the Huaca de la Luna, in the highest of the structure's chambers - a discovery that was subsequently lost again to drifting sand. It was not until 1925, and more substantially through 1926, that excavators cleared several meters of the same walls and found a whole series of painted scenes, most of them depicting combat.

Kroeber, Archaeological Explorations in Peru, Part II (1930) · Martin St-Amant · CC BY 3.0

Weapons that fight back

The paintings were made by whitewashing the mud-plastered adobe, incising the outlines of each figure, going over those incisions in black, and filling the enclosed areas with red, yellow, pink and light blue. What they show is stranger than ordinary battle scenes: human figures fighting against personified weapons and implements, brought to life and turned against the people who had made them - a "revolt of the artifacts" myth also known from ancient Mexico, suggesting a shared current of belief reaching across two otherwise unconnected civilizations.

Fowler Museum at UCLA · Kroeber, Archaeological Explorations in Peru, Part II (1930) · Daderot · Public domain

A room repeatedly repainted

Traces of earlier coats of plaster beneath the visible paintings show that these chambers were decorated more than once over time, and one section of unfinished outline - drawn but never filled with color - suggests the work, or the room itself, was abandoned before completion. At the center of the painted wall stood a stepped, throne-like platform, its risers painted on both their tops and sides, hinting that whatever stood in the niche it framed - an altar, an image, a seat - was itself part of the scene the painters were depicting. The murals rank among the clearest surviving evidence of how the people who built the twin pyramids of Moche told their own stories on the walls of their own temple.

A working chronology

endDrafted from Collier, Cultural Chronology and Change as Reflected in the Ceramics of the Virú Valley, Peru (1955)

Fixing the Mochica period in calendar time occupied Peruvian archaeologists for decades. Before radiocarbon dating existed, the only firm anchors available came from the Inca and Chimu dynasty lists themselves, which placed the founding of the Chimu kingdom between about A.D. 1300 and 1350 and the Inca conquest of the north coast between 1462 and 1470. Everything earlier than that had to be estimated from stratigraphy, from the accumulation rate of guano deposits, and from comparison with sequences worked out elsewhere - methods that left North American archaeologists guessing, for years, that the whole span of Peruvian civilization from the earliest monumental culture to the Inca had unfolded within the previous two thousand years.

Bennett's working dates

By the time the Virú Valley Project's excavators had assembled the evidence available to them, Wendell Bennett's 1949 estimate had become the chronology most archaeologists in the field were working from: a Gallinazo and Mochica period running from about A.D. 300 to 1000, preceded by centuries of Salinar and Cupisnique culture and followed by what the source itself terms simply the Late Epoch - the interval from the collapse of Mochica culture until the Spanish conquest, spanning the Chimu kingdom that eventually rose on the same stretch of coast. Early radiocarbon dates, still new and contested when this chronology was compiled, complicated the picture in places without overturning its basic shape.

Fowler Museum at UCLA · Collier, Cultural Chronology and Change as Reflected in the Ceramics of the Virú Valley, Peru (1955) · Daderot · Public domain

An ending still without a story

What actually brought Mochica rule on the north coast to a close is a question this chronology answers only in dates, not in events - a range of years rather than a narrative. What followed, in the centuries the source calls simply the Late Epoch, was the rise of the Chimu kingdom on the same stretch of coast the Mochica builders had once occupied.