This reconstruction fills the dramatically darkened final gallery of “The Royal Tombs of Sipan,” the first American exhibition ever devoted to the little-known pre-Incan civilization called the Moche. The show, which opened last week in Los An at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History,’; stars artifacts from three 1,700-year-old burial chambers that constitute “the richest tombs ever excavated in the “Western Hemisphere,” says cocurator Christopher Donnan. They are also among the richest discovered anywhere since Howard Carter peered into the tomb of King Tutankhamen in 1922. The glitter is what attracts viewers, but the artifacts have a deeper significance. Gold-and-turquoise ornaments with intricate seashell inlay, wide, biblike collars made of small beads in colorful patterns, delightful sculptures of brooding faces furrowed with character and decorated pottery that rivals the painterly ceramics of classical Athens are forcing scholars to reappraise what Donnan calls “one of the most remarkable civilizations of the ancient world.”
The Moche flourished between the first and eighth centuries along 250 miles of Peru’s northern coast (map, page 70). Ever e William Randolph Hearst’s mother financed an archeological dig–there in the 1890s, scholars have known the Moche as a resourceful culture with an entrenched artisan class. Then, in 1987, the black market in antiquities began to be flooded with artifacts unlike any the world had seen. Peruvian authorities investigated and found that grave robbers had looted previously unknown tombs. Peruvian archeologist Walter Alva quickly traced the looted treasures to a tomb at Sipan, a center of Moche civilization, hired an armed guard and began salvaging what turned out to be seven levels of graves and temples. The top layer, dated at A.D. 300, contained the tomb of the Lord of Sipan, the warrior-priest now starring at UCLA. “We had identified him in 1972, but we thought he was mythical,” says Donnan. But when he saw the remains, Donnan thought, “Wait a minute, I know who that is.” He says the mythical figures can now be seen as real people and what he thought of as supernatural activities as real events.
Since the Moche never developed writing, that realization was like discovering a New World Rosetta stone. Now archeologists could read the history of this civilization in its art. Pictures of blood sacrifice, once thought mythological, are now believed to depict the ritual slaughter of prisoners captured in war, their blood offered in a tall goblet to the warrior-priest himself. In another recurring motif, a half-spider/half-man deity holds some hapless warrior’s head in hand: does this portray the larks of the Moche elite?
Paradoxically, though, what seem to be straightforward port of ordinary activities are such thing. “Virtually nothing of everyday life is depicted [in Moche art] for its own sake Donnan wrote in 1990. “deer hunt” painted on a ceramic piece turns out to be ceremonial kill by a social elite sea-lion hunt is a ritual quest for stomach stones believed to have magical curative properties.
To support artists and artisans responsible for these creations, the Moche needed a diverse, thriving and highly organized economy. (The society clearly had riches to burn, at least bury: the aristocracy was interred with its riches creating a perennial demand for the gold, silver and turquoise trappings of the elite.) The Moche channeled rivers into an elaborate system of irrigation canals to grow maize, beans and other crops in the arid climate. They had 100,000 acres under cultivation–more than the modern Peruvians had until the 1970s. They domesticated Muscovy duck, llamas and guinea pigs, and took to the sea in tiny boats made of reeds to harvest fish, shrimp and crabs. They built truncated pyramids, hundreds of which still stand. One group anchored an urban center of 10,000 people. The Pyramid of the Sun (Huaca del Sol)–made of 140 million mud bricks–soared to 135 feet and covered an area of 12 acres, almost as large as that of Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza.
The craftsmen supported by this strong economy excelled not only in art but also in technology. They were the first in South America to produce pottery from molds, making a wide range of ceramics available to all classes. They invented electricity–less “electroplating” (to deposit thin layers of gold and silver on copper), using chemicals rather than current. They perfected stamps to decorate pots and vessels with elaborate scenes of hunting, fishing, religious ceremonies, war and sex.
But it is not the evidence of their life–the shadows of irrigation canals, the ruins of temples–that speaks most of the Moche. It is the evidence of their deaths. The elite buried with members their court-relatives, warriors, attendants, priest–some of whom had died years before and been kept in storage. Even the poor and the middle class-interred with simple shrouds and corncobs rather than gold armor and silver baubles–received ritualized burials. The body is oriented with the head pointing north or south, and is on its back. The hands grip objects–copper, gold or silver for the elite, potsherds and twigs for the poor. “It’s as if they were saying, ‘A poor woman will get a proper burial even if we can’t give her fancy things’,” says anthropologist John Verano of the Smithsonian Institution, who has excavated “middle class” Moche cemeteries. “The Moche had a strong sense of how one should go into death.”
Although the Moche traded with what is now Chile for lapis lazuli, and with jungle tribes for the boa constrictors, jaguars, toucans and monkeys immortalized in jewelry and ceramics, they were not conquerors like the Inca. Perhaps because they did not build an empire-even their river valleys were independent, with their own leaders and pyramids-history slights the Moche. The tombs of Sipan are changing that. In Eurocentric Peru, status has been a matter of how many European grandparents one can claim. But the Sipan finds are helping to transform the society’s view of its past in a way that knowledge of the Inca, who succeeded the Moche on the coastal plains in the year 1200, never did -perhaps because the Inca were vanquished by the conquistadors. “The discoveries are helping create a national consciousness about the significance of the ancient cultures of Peru,” says Alva. Restaurants and shops are being renamed after “El Senor de Sipan.” When some Moche artifacts were returned from a German showing this spring, it was a state occasion: led by President Alberto Fujimori, the Peruvian elite turned out to see the bones of the warrior-priest, encased in a glass coffin, at Limas Government Palace.
Archeologists find no trace of the Moche after the year 750. Earthquakes and relentless droughts may have undermined the economic foundation of the civilization, but there was a subtler force, too. Art and artifacts hint at crushing pressures from the outside. The art style unravels, with fewer of the stylized elements characteristic of the glory days. The artists even made mistakes, showing people in inappropriate costume. “They seemed to lose touch with the stories they were depicting,” says the Smithsonian’s Verano. “The society was opening up to outside influences, and at some point it just didn’t hang together.” The clearest sign that the culture was fragmenting was an abrupt change in burial practices, says Verano: “The dead literally sat up in their grave.” Exactly what, or who, brought an end to the majesty of the Moche remains as much a mystery as the fall of their contemporaries, the Maya. For all their expressiveness, not even the Moche’s silver, gold and ceramic creations breathe the secret.
*The UCLA show runs until Jan. 2, then travels to Houston, New York, Detroit and Washington through 1995.
