A team of archaeologists digging at the Ucupe archaeological site in the north-western Peruvian region of Lambayeque have discovered Moche civilization graves dating back 1,400 years.
The Moche people, also known as the Mochica culture, ruled over the northern coast of modern-day Peru beginning about 2000 years ago, and according to a news report in RPP the archaeologists discovered “ceremonial chambers”. According to Archaeology News Network , “the first grave may have belonged to a military leader as weapons and a crown were found with the remains.”
Skeletons of a woman and a 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥 were found in one grave “surrounded by copper ornaments” and three ceramic urns were recovered from the second grave. The third burial contained the remains of a man, the eldest of the group.
One of the urns was found to contain symbolic content and depicted “a leader” sitting upon a throne, and while it is easy to imagine that it might be a depiction of the man in the grave, his social status is currently undetermined .
The other urns have images of a snail and an erotic act being performed , all of which the archaeologists hope “will give insights into the social organisation of the Moche civilisation.”
Who Were the Moche People?Predating the better known Inca people, the Moche are generally thought of as a group of autonomous polities sharing a common culture that flourished in northern Peru between 100 AD and 700 AD. Their capital city is situated near present-day Moche, Trujillo, Peru where pyramids and temples still stand today.
According to a research paper titled The Moche of Northern Perú , by scholars Luis Jaime Castillo Butters and Santiago Uceda CastilloIn, in 1899 and 1900, archaeologist Max Uhle excavated the first Moche site. Known as ‘Huaca de la Luna’ this is where the architectural complex called Huacas de Moche (Pyramids of Moche) is located in the Moche Valley, and the name of this particular architectural site is where the name of the Moche culture came from.
Modern Moche DiscoveriesA February 2001 article published in New York Times tells of a team of U.S. archaeologists exploring at Sipan, in northern Peru, where royal tombs were uncovered in the late 1980s. They uncovered “three тʀᴇᴀsuʀᴇ-filled tombs in a 105-foot-high pyramid” and lead archaeologist Christopher Donnan of the University of California in Los Angeles told reporters at the time that these tombs “are among the richest that have ever been found.”
Then in 2013, National Geographic published an article about a team of archaeologists at the site of San José de Moro in the Jequetepeque River valley of northern Peru discovering a 1,200-year-old Moche woman. Laid to rest in an elaborate ceremony in about 750 AD, this highly “ revered woman ” was buried in a chamber located 20 feet (6 meters) beneath the ground and the walls of her tomb were painted red with niches holding ceramic offerings.
The woman’s skeleton was found on a low platform at one end of the chamber and it was adorned with a bead necklace. A “silver goblet” was found beside the woman’s body, an artifact which often appears in Moche art depicting human sacrifice and the ritual consumption of blood. Accompanying this woman to the afterlife the archaeologists found “two sacrificed female attendants along with five 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren.”
The Fate of the Moche PeopleExcavations at Huaca de la Luna have ʀᴇvᴇᴀʟed a timeline for the end of the Mochica civilization, which seemed to occur around 800 AD, at which time there was an increase in the performance of the Sacrifice Ceremony, and multiple transformations of the Huaca de la Luna monument.
In spite of the collapse of the political institutions and elite class, life remained mostly unchanged on the north coast of Peru after they were gone, evident in the field irrigation systems which continued functioning, and the use of their advanced technologies, such as their ability to make copper appear like gold.
Top Image: A rich Moche grave with elaborate copper artifacts and several ceramic vessels. Source: Deisy Cubas
