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The Art and Archaeology of the Moche: An Ancient Andean Society of the Peruvian North Coast

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This book is a collection of topflight academic papers from a conference on Moche civilization held at the University of Texas, in 2003. It includes a wealth of thoughtful contributions by all the main international heavyweights in the field. Bibliographies direct you to other sources, including URLs. Profusely illustrated with hundreds of photos and drawings, this is an outstanding contribution to pre-Columbian history. Although most of the graphics are in black and white, they clearly illustrate the authors' points. Some intriguing objects, such the complicated ideographic "murals" in bas relief uncovered at the 'Moon Sanctuary' and the 'Old Cao Sanctuary,' receive short shrift. The few, delicious, color plates are carefully chosen. This collection shows archaeologists mobilizing analytical assistance from other sciences such as osteology, metallurgy, genetics, botany, and zoology to broaden our understanding by tempering their intuitions, derived from the fineline drawings and the architecture, with physical facts of many different orders. One example, from a paper by Donna Mcclelland, concerns the "ulluchu" fruits whose images typically attend scenes of blood sacrifice and warfare. These fruits, whose name originated with Peruvian businessman Rafael Larco Hoyle, seem large in the drawings but are actually quite small, less than three centimeters long. Only a few ulluchu have ever been recovered from Moche sites and identifying them has stumped botanists. In fact, assertions the Swedish ethnologist Gordon Wassen and his co-authors made in the 1980s that classify the ulluchu as a relative of the papaya and that claim it keeps blood from coagulating, as the papain in papaya might, are almost certainly wrong. Other themes treated include warfare, interethnic relations, participants in the Sacrifice Ceremony, modalities of human dismemberment, the giant fighters, the personages in the Coca Ceremony under the Milky Way, and the local effects of those global climate forces, El Nino and La Nina.