Video: Tales of the Moche Kings and Queens: Elite Burials from the North Coast of Peru


 

2017 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the discovery of the Lord of Sipán, one of the most spectacular gold tombs found in the Americas and the first of many elite tombs found in northern Peru. The remains of these burial sites provide a treasure trove of information about ancient Moche art, technology, and beliefs. Jeffrey Quilter shared firsthand information about elite burial excavations and discuss how studies of these tombs have shaped our understanding of Moche social and political organization, helping to settle the debate over whether the Moche were a state society. 

See more about Moche culture in the Moche Ceramics exhibit and The Moche of Ancient Peru: Media and Messages

Jeffrey Quilter, William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; Senior Lecturer on Anthropology, Harvard University 

Recorded September 26, 2017

Transcript

[00:00:10.95] Thank you, Jane. And welcome to everyone here whose come out this evening to what feels like the beginning of the summer lecture series. But in fact, here we are in the fall. It's a great pleasure and honor to introduce my very good friend of many years Jeff Quilter. Jeff is the William and Muriel Seabury House Director of the Peabody Museum of Archaelogy and Ethnology, and Senior Lecturer on Anthropology at Harvard. Jeff was born in New York City. He's a consummate New York City boy. He received his BA in Social Sciences from the College of the University of Chicago, and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of California Santa Barbara.

[00:00:58.35] Jeff is an anthropological archaeologist. His research interests, which are wide and varied, and are represented in a truly impressive publication record, and I'll mention that more specifically a bit later on, include interest and research longtime research in Andean South America, the Moche culture of the North Coast of Peru, and especially their politics, history, society, and religion. He's been interested in interactions between and shared culture among new world peoples having excavated archaeological sites from Costa Rica to the Central Coast of Peru. And he's also been interested in social change, and transformations, and the limits and potential of archaeology in understanding the past. So his interests are wide and varied indeed.

[00:01:52.92] Professor Quilter's early career was focused on questions of the origins of sedentism, which he studied excavating the site of Paloma on the coast of Peru. And the study of complex societies, which he pursued in excavations at the sites of Media Luna and El Paraiso. During the period of instability in Peru, or the period of Sendero Luminoso during the 1980s and the 1990s, Jeff switched his research focus to examine the art and iconography of the Moche of Peru. He also developed an interest at this time in the different discourses of art history, anthropology, and history in discussing the past.

[00:02:38.25] Since 2002, he has been working in cooperation with Peruvian archaeologists at El Brujo Archaeological Complex in the Chicama Valley on the Central Coast of Peru. And currently, he directs a multi-disciplinary study of a 16th to 17th century colonial town and church complex at the place of Santa Magdalena de Cao Viejo at El Brujo. He has on at least three occasions led the Harvard summer school joint Harvard Catolica University from Lima Archeological Field School at the extraordinary sight of San Jose de Moro accompanied by his Peruvian colleague Luis Jaime Castillo.

[00:03:22.50] Jeff has published numerous books and edited volumes on a wide and impressive array of topics in archaeology, and culture, and art history. His monographs include Life and Death at Palomo: Society and Mortuary Practices in a Preceramic Peruvian Village published in 1989, Cobble Circles and Standing Stones: Archaeology at the Rivas Site in Costa Rica that was published in 2004, Treasures of the Andes 2005, The Moche of Ancient Peru Media and Messages, which he published for the Peabody Museum here in 2010. And the great, truly extraordinary synthetic work on Peruvian archaeology entitled The Ancient Central Andes published by Routledge in 2014. His book on the Moche of Ancient Peru, which Jane Pickering just mentioned, features the Peabody's collection of Moche ceramics will be available for sale after the lecture at the table to my right.

[00:04:25.32] Jeff has taught at Ripon College Wisconsin from 1981 to 1995. He served as Director of Pre-Colombian Studies and Curator of the Pre-Colombian Collection at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC from 1995 to 2005. Just sit still. I'll finish this soon. From 2005 to 2011, he served as Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Intermediate Area Archaeology at the Peabody Museum, and in 2012, he was appointed as Director of the Peabody Museum. Jeff teachers courses in the Archaeology program and the Anthropology Department, including courses on ancient Peru, Moche culture and history, and archaeological methods and theory.

[00:05:13.62] The talk we will have the privilege of hearing tonight is one of the first, if not the first presentation of materials that he recently researched during a sabbatical at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. This was during his sabbatical in spring 2017. So this is all fresh new material and very excited. And so please join me in welcoming Jeff Quilter.

[00:05:46.22] Thank you, Gary. And thank you all for coming. And thank you, Jane. Thank you all for coming. It's a pleasure to be here. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about some research I've been doing lately. And I thought I'd begin by going back to a wonderful talk we had here a week ago this past Monday by that wonderful archaeologist, Simon Martin, who talked about the Maya. And even for those of you who were not here for that talk, the Maya are extremely well known. They're probably one of the best known Pre-Colombian cultures because of their wonderful art and because of the great amount of research that's been done on them. Of which, the Peabody Museum and the Department of Anthropology at Harvard has a long and storied tradition. If you go to our third floor galleries, you'll see impressive Maya art. I think that's better.

[00:06:57.18] And one of the things that Simon said, and is true, is that one of the great powers of Maya archaeology is that it has the opportunity to look at texts. So that we can actually read and understand the voices of the Maya themselves. And he gave us a diagram something like this. And there's that overlap between the text and the artifacts. There's also a tension between them as well, in that they don't always read the same way or say the same things. But tonight, I'm going to talk about a different situation.

[00:07:34.47] About a culture that is more or less contemporary with the Maya, but is in South America on the north coast of Peru. And instead of having two overlapping circles, we just have one because the Moche also know as the Mochica did not have writing. They also, it's important to remember, did not have a cash or money economy among many other things. So we just have that one circle. We just have artifacts. Although, we do have a little circle because there are long standing cultural traditions, and there are historical accounts that can be generally connected to some things we can see in Moche archaeology.

[00:08:21.09] But by and large we mostly have archaeology. And by and large, the concepts we work with are ones that we create ourselves in looking at the past-- looking at archaeological sites, and looking and artifacts. So Moche is an archaeological culture. As far as we know, no one ever called him or herself a Moche except for the current residents of the town of Moche in the Moche Valley. Otherwise, the term is what we have imposed upon a set of artifacts set in a distinctive artifacts in a limited time and space.

[00:09:01.63] That's what an archaeological culture is. And here we have it. So we have distinctive artifacts represented by these two objects here. And we have the North Coast of Peru. And we have this distinctive time period roughly from about 350 to 850 of the current era or A.D. About the same time as to Maya mind a little earlier and a little earlier as well. But it's generally the moment-- the classic Maya.

[00:09:30.79] Now, the study of the Moche, also known as Mochica, has a long history of investigation just like the Maya. We have accounts from the colonial period. Even though the Moche were long dead, their ruins were around. And Spanish colonial writers talked about it. Wrote it down-- though they didn't know how to figure these things.

[00:09:53.22] And the first systematic archaeological investigations of Moche remains was by a visiting German archaeologist Max Uhle over there, who worked at the largest Moche temples known as huacas-- adobe temples in the Moche Valley. I'm saying Moche a lot. Aren't I? And this was some of the earliest professional archaeology done in South America. He Actually worked a little bit earlier elsewhere in Peru, but this is among the earliest projects done by professional archaeologists in Peru. But he then left. He actually wound up in San Francisco working for Phoebe Hearst of the newspaper fortune.

[00:10:36.06] And it was really a local landowner, a local hacendado named Rafael Larko Hoyle, who was the person who really created modern Moche studies. And Hoyle is a fascinating character. I wish we had time to talk about him. But he was a very sophisticated man. He went to Cornell University, and got a degree in Agronomy so he could run his estates better. And he was very sophisticated worldly person who lived on his hacienda in the valley right next to the Moche Valley known as the Chicama Valley. And started off doing basically amateur archeology, but at a very professional level for his time. And he amassed lots of collections. And he did a very important thing, which is he published. He published his results. And it was he who came up with this idea of the Moche culture as distinct.

[00:11:31.46] And here we have a quote that Larko made. I won't read it. But if you read it, you can see that he was extremely proud of Moche culture. He saw it as a golden age of society in ancient Peru. And he conceptualized it as a vast civilization under a sophisticated form of government with a sophisticated system of ruler ship and so forth and so on. Remember, he was writing this in 1945-- right at the end of World War II when the idea of nation states, the idea of peaceful and prosperous society as opposed to the ravages that had occurred in Europe took place.

[00:12:15.89] So his vision was clearly shaped by his times and his understanding of the archaeology of the day. And it prevailed actually for many, many years. Almost 40 years. And we still rely upon Larko's vision today. Many, many of his insights still are extremely important in doing Moche archaeology. But our view has changed. And it's changed from research that's been done particularly since the late 1980s into the 1990s to the present day. We could have a whole lecture about those changes. But we don't have time. So I will just note that he had a view of uniformity in Moche society. And a single system of government that stretched across nine different river valleys on the North Coast of Peru.

[00:13:12.98] He also, and critical to the understanding of how this view developed, he had this concept that Moche ceramics represented a corporate style. They represented a style coming from a central administration and planning. And that the kinds of ceramics were uniform and changed systematically from the earliest phase here-- phase one to phase two, to phase three, to phase four, to phase five. And based upon what he knew at the time, this made perfect sense. But as in all scientific research, the more you know, the more complicated things usually get.

[00:13:50.33] And so because of that research that was done in the last 30 years, we now know that Larko's five stage model doesn't hold, that the ceramic sequences are much more complex. And since those ceramic sequences were used as the means to understand the chronology of Moche, the chronology has somewhat fallen apart. And although, that's a good thing, because now we're re-examining that all together.

[00:14:21.48] Similarly, ideas about corporate labor and groups of laborers working on big temples have become complicated. So this idea of marked adobes, we have these adobes with distinctive marks on them, that were once thought to represent labor groups and so forth and so on has become more complicated. The consequences are, and one problem that has existed, is over these many, many, years of doing research in the Larko mode, there were not a lot of radiocarbon dates taken. Because the idea that the five phase sequence was rock solid was so strong that it just perdured in the face of everything else. Now, we have a different view.

[00:15:07.59] Similarly, so here's the valleys. And at one time, the Moche state was thought to stretch from the far south here all the way up to the northern valleys here as one single system. The sort of general view of Moche culture these days is that the northern Moche and these valleys up here, were individual polonies or political systems of some sort. But the idea of a single Moche system down here still maintains itself for a variety of reasons. I frankly, don't think that this is likely. Partly because of what I call the cartographic fallacy.

[00:15:53.18] And it's just a simple thing that we do with maps. When we do maps and we want to show the area of influence for a particular culture, we color them in like this. Right? Like a nation state. Like we do coloring France blue, and England or Britain pink, and so forth and so on. But in actual fact, did any pre-industrial society actually control and did it want to control the deserts in between these valleys? I think not. I think it's more likely that the concentration of power, and population, and economics, and everything else was in a valley to valley system. And that would very likely lead to valley to valley political systems.

[00:16:42.77] Now, all of Moche studies radically changed in 1987. And in 1987, a discovery was made that literally transformed not only just Moche studies, but it transformed Peru's understanding of its past because it was the uncovering of the most elaborate gold burial ever found in the New World at a site called Sipan. In which is a long story. It's also a very elaborate story of how this all came about.

[00:17:17.16] But basically, archaeologists had not been digging in temples looking for big tombs previously for a variety of reasons. Again, too complicated to go into now. But it was not done partly because there was some of these sites are so badly destroyed from looting is that the supposition was is that there probably wasn't much left to excavate. And in this excavation, which was done by Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva and with American archaeologist Christopher Donnan, they found this spectacular tomb of a man who had died in Moche times and been buried with a sumptuous wealth.

[00:18:06.75] Elaborate ear spools-- three different sets of ears spools here, and all sorts of ornaments, and decorations, and costumes that could be reconstructed as you see in this figure here. Now, that excavation took place very slowly starting in 1987. The results really didn't start coming out that other people could appreciate them until the 1990s-- early 1990s. And at about the same time, another discovery was made also by Christopher Donnan-- really one of the great archaeologists of Moche Mochica cultures working United States at UCLA.

[00:18:48.82] And has done an amazing job of publishing his work as well. And he working with a young student who since become a major archaeologist who's been here at Harvard, Luis Jaime Castillo, found another set of remarkable burials. And these were women. A series of women who were buried in a large chamber also with all sorts of metalwork. The metal work has turned green. But it's because it's a gold, copper alloy. And the copper tends to corrode. So the object turns green even though it has high amount of gold. And with a sacrificed burial outside of it lots of other artifacts.

[00:19:29.66] And this was remarkable furthermore because a connection was made between these burials and Moche art. Now, a lot of previous Moche studies had been done looking at art because the art was available. Because there were huge numbers of Moche ceramics in museums. The Peabody Museum has one of the outstanding collections of Moche ceramics in North America. And a lot of these collections were made in times when the standards are not of what they are today. And some of them were made through the illegal excavations of archaeological sites in Peru. And these collections exist.

[00:20:17.79] And because of the Moche art style being so representational, another thing it shares with the Maya although in a different style, you can identify individuals on the basis of their costumes, and ornaments, and so forth. And it was found that the Lord of Sipan as well as the burials at San Jose de Moro, the site linked to individuals seen in the art. For example, this is a replica of the burial at San Jose de Moro. Buried with these large ornamental devices that correspond to the jester headdress of this woman figured in the art here. And the Lord of Sipan links to this figure here. It used to be known as the rain deity.

[00:21:10.28] But suddenly, we had more than just the art. We actually had the burials. And in the subsequent years, between the late 1980s to today, a number of large scale burials of elites have been found up and down the coast of Peru. In fact, there's about five of them-- five or six of them depending on your count-- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And they are available to study. And a little side here as to how I came to do this. I was granted the wonderful opportunity of having a sabbatical last spring term. And I went to this great place called the Bard Graduate Center in New York City that does very interesting studies and combinations of research on material culture. And I originally had a plan to do some other project. But it wasn't available. It didn't work through as I had planned.

[00:22:07.21] And so I was kind of left without my original plan being able to be carried out. And I thought you know, I should go back and really read all those Moche publications in more detail than I had done before. Scholars often work by reading sort of selectively and very quickly. And so I was given the luxury of being able to read in more details. And I started reading all these reports on these elaborate Moche burials. And I got very excited because what I realized is there was a lot of data there on each of the sets of barriers if you will. And it seemed that no one had actually stepped back and tried to make comparisons between the different tombs.

[00:22:57.21] The Peruvian archaeologist, and the American archaeologist, and other foreigners who've worked on these tombs have done amazing jobs of publication. Very thorough publishing of the details. But no one ever actually looked at how is the Lord of Sipan compare with these other burials. And so I started to do that. So this is archeology without getting dirty. The digging has been done. The reports had been written on the individual sites. But this was archaeology of looking at data across different sites. And as you can see, there's a lot of burials. So at Sipan, we don't have just the Lord of Sipan, we actually have a total of about 29 burials that could be interpreted as elite-- or most of whom could be interpreted as elite.

[00:23:49.85] So here's an example of those burials just listed here so you can see it. But what I want to draw your attention to is the nature of archaeological inquiry, which is primarily pattern recognition. Looking for patterns in data. And of course, this is something that's not unique to archeology. It happens in many, many disciplines. If you start looking for patterns in your data of repeating occurrences, it can lead to at least seeing correlations. Every time I get this, this also seems to occur as well. Now, correlation is not causation. We can't prove that one thing means another. But in a situation as we have with the Moche, where we do not have written sources, we can at least advance carefully in seeing correlations, and making some cautious links as to what those correlations might mean as possible causations.

[00:24:48.41] So here's some examples of the variety of burials produced in a marvelous volume by Walter Alva These wonderful sort of blow ups I guess of the burials all separated in terms of their different grave goods. They're reported in great detail including the animal sacrifices. And some of them are quite simple. Although, we may wonder if you're buried in one of these temple mounds, except for sacrifice we know there were human sacrifices. Those were certainly not elites we would assume. But if your buried with relatively few objects, but you're buried in a temple, is that an indicator that you're an elite? Because many other people were getting buried in their villages or other places. But we'll leave that question for now.

[00:25:45.81] So just to run through a couple of these, here's the Lord of Sipan. OK. And what I started doing in doing this pattern recognition, is I could see that there were certain kinds of artifacts that occurred over and over again. So the Lord of Sipan had three different masks that were placed on him. He had three different sets of nose ornaments, which are known as narigueras. OK. Nose ornaments. He had 4 crowns, [INAUDIBLE], 3 pairs of ear ornaments, 15 necklaces, a pora is a two handled club, other kinds of weapons, 30 weapons, and a stand as we talk about those in a minute. And there were nine humans associated with him. Now, not all of those were sacrifices. But there were nine other human individuals associated with him, and two llamas, which were sacrificed.

[00:26:34.25] There's also the old Lord of Sipan. OK. An earlier burial also of a high ranking individual. But notice he had seven masks, and eight narigueras, but only three crowns, and so forth and so on. So interesting patterns. They seem to have the same kinds of materials. Although, the number per burial seems to vary per elite burial. Here's another one. This is another site. So the Sipans in a northern valley known as the Lambayeque Valley-- Lambayeque Valley system. This one's a little farther down the coast, and was excavated by a Canadian archaeologist named Steve Bourget. And he found a guy known as the Lord of Ucupe who had 3 masks, 5 narigueras, but 18 crowns. So forth and so on. One weapon. It was three humans, not all of whom are sacrificed. It's sometimes hard to know if someone's a sacrifice or not. Sometimes it's obvious. Sometimes it's not. And one llama.

[00:27:43.04] Also interestingly enough, the Lord of Ucupe had a lot of silver instead of gold in his burial. And the Lord of Ucupe also had a lot of these poras-- these double handed maces or clubs. Many more than the Lord of Sipan. At another site, Dos Cabezas, excavated by Christopher Donnan. It's called Dos Cabezas because it's got two heads. The huaca-- it's got two heads. It was originally a solid temple-- elaborate temple. But it got split in two by looting in the colonial era that dug this huge trench in the middle. And wound up with a declivity in the middle. So it's known locally as Dos Cabezas. And Chris found a number of burials it seems of people of somewhat lesser rank perhaps if we judge that on the basis of the number of objects. The richest one was tomb two. Amazingly found with a nariguera still in place and a crown still on its head, 1 mask, 7 narigueras, 14 crowns, and so forth and so on.

[00:29:00.86] So in going through all this material, I came to a conclusion that there was a standard pattern here. So this lists sort of the basic outfit of your standard Moche lord as found in these tombs. So you have a frontlet or crest. If it's a helmet like device, it's a crest. If it's a crown, it tends to be a frontlet-- an object placed in the front like a crest. Then a crown or a helmet. Plumes were often found. Not shown here. The nose rings, ear ornaments, necklaces, a pectoral this large bib-like device like a necklace of fine beads are called pectoral. Oops.

[00:29:49.93] And let's go back. And a tunic-- not always with all these little gold plates but sometimes. A standard, which is this device. It's a device often gilded that appears to have perhaps been used like a banner or like a flag that was maybe carried around by an assistant when the lord was walking around and being important. Bracelets are almost always included. A rattle knife of some kind, belts with belt rattles, tinklers, and a back flap. It's shown here, which we'll get to in a minute. Or some kind of accessory in the back. And again, there's a little variation. But this seems to be the general outfit of a Moche lord when he was buried. Yes, I'm saying he because most of these burials are male with a few exceptions. One of which is at San Jose de Moro as I showed you.

[00:31:00.52] So just looking at crowns, this is a depiction of a warrior. So he has a headdress with a crest on it. This isn't unusual. So we have some unusual representations in the art we can't place archaeologically because we never found anything like this archaeologically. But these down here sort of fit the pattern more of what we're seeing for example at Dos Cabezas and in other sites of a cylindrical crown usually made of metal, and then with a frontlet placed on it. Sometimes they call it a diadem. I prefer frontlet as part of the ornamentation. And here is one of the crests found I think that's at Sipan.

[00:31:50.18] One of the things I discovered in looking at these patterns is that ear ornaments seem to be only in the graves of a very few of the highest elites. So ear ornaments are found only with the Lord of Sipan, the old Lord of Sipan, the Lord of Ucupe that we saw, the warrier priest, which is another burial we'll talk about a little bit later. But also with warriors. So at Sipan there are some burials I mean apparently non elite. Very robust man who may have been sacrificed, who were in apparently relatively good health buried with a club and a few objects. But including ear spools. Usually simple wooden ones.

[00:32:48.44] And at the Huacas de Moche site that we talked about earlier, Christopher Donnan and a woman named Carol Mackey found a set of burials that seemed to be buried a part, and appeared to be warriors. Again, they were of prime age for being warriors, and they all had ear spools too. So I think that ear spools are associated with warriorship. And that's why they only occur among certain men. There are adult men buried with lots and lots of goods-- no weapons though. And they don't have ear spools. So I think I a connection between the wearing of ear spools and the role of men as warriors.

[00:33:37.58] It's further emphasized because this indication that juniors, young men, don't have ear spools. They have these ear tubes. This is clearly a young individual judging by his juvenile looking face. He's wearing ear tubes running through his ear ornaments. And this fellow here, from a very early 20th century publication, has his tubes in a different angle. But I suspect that this is like an age grade system. It's quite likely many, many societies of warriors start off as a junior warrior. Then you have to do something in order to get raised to the rank of being a senior warrior.

[00:34:29.72] So the backflap, a true Moche tale-- sorry-- is shown in depictions of warriors-- various kinds. They seem like they'd be very inconvenient as devices to wear in battle. Some people think a lot of Moche battles were primarily ritual. It's possible that some battles were ritual or that some rituals were done as battles. But we have lots of evidence to suggest that there were lots of real battles. And we find these ceremonial back flaps-- this is of heavy gold-- and it was found with a Lord of Sipan-- or at Sipan. It would not be practical to wear this into battle by any means. It would inconvenience you. So it's probably a ceremonial item. And have not found any examples of what backflaps that may have been used for combat may have looked like. So those are clearly warrior associated.

[00:35:37.48] We have things called back accessories. This one was found at Huacas de Moche site and this was found at the site called Huaca Cao Viejo where I've worked. And we have Moche representations of one of these back accessories here on the back here. And here's another one here as well. They seem like they're kind of backpacks because the ones that have been found actually have had objects in them-- like little bits and pieces of gold left over. But it's clearly not a practical object. It's clearly part of a ceremonial outfit.

[00:36:15.25] Again, looking at pattern recognition, another thing I found is that nose ornaments or narigueras seem to be among the most precious objects of Moche elite. They're not however, restricted to the uppermost ranks of the Moche elite. They seem to be much more commonly distributed, but they're often found on the nose, or in the vicinity of the nose, or next to the face. But sometimes they're often found in the hands of individuals. And sometimes in both hands. So they seem to have some kind of value, and it's related to adornment. And potentially, for prestation. As they say for giving perhaps, from one lord to another as gifts, or exchanging for treaties, or so forth and so on. As I said, this is not a money economy. So it wasn't on the basis of cash. But these may have been almost like a proto money among the elite. Only for the elite.

[00:37:23.26] Also pectorals seem to be extremely reserved for only the very highest ranks. Necklaces however, are quite common and seem to be a very personal type of item. The variation in necklaces is huge. You have things made of very tiny beads. You have other things made of larger beads. You have some burials with lots and lots of necklaces. And some burials with very few. So a real necklace-- a long, descending cord with small beads on it seems to be quite common. But the pectorals were again, only for the elites.

[00:38:08.74] So this is kind of a summary. If we compare the various lords, and these are not all of them, but some of them, we'll see that the red boxes indicate the individual with the highest number of different ornaments. So the Lord of Sipan really knocks it out of the ball park in having the highest number of ear ornaments-- this is pairs of ear ornaments-- highest number of necklaces, highest number of weapons, highest number of humans associated with him, and the highest number of llamas. OK. But the Lord of Ucupe actually has the greatest number of crowns. Now, I don't know what this means. I don't know how we'll ever figure out what this means. I think it must mean something. It may be simply an individual lord's preference for having his workmen, his craftsmen make various kinds of objects. But it seems to me the overall pattern that there is a common set of burial equipment that goes to the grave with you is interesting. And what these variable patterns might mean remains to be seen.

[00:39:23.15] Another thing that I found that is rather interesting is the role of these little crudely made ceramics that are found at various Moche sites. And they're sometimes found in groups. Often groups based on the number five. The Moche seemed to have had to either 5 based or a 10 based number system. But they're not always. Sometimes they are odd numbers like 15 or 13. At Dos Cabezas, there were separate groups in the grave of these little what Christopher Donnan calls ofrendas. And here's some in a tomb at San Jose de Moro. There were a bunch of smashed ones at Dos Cabezas. And these seem to be some kind of little offering that is being made at the funeral site itself. And I think one of the things that we've not really looked on until recently is how much the remains found in tombs represent the actual practices of the funeral rather than representing the goods that are being buried with an individual from his or her life.

[00:40:47.16] And so perhaps, these little ofrendas, could they have represented the number of people who were at the funeral ceremony? Possibly. Although, it's very hard to say. It might be so given the fact that you find them in these odd numbers and in these little groups around and in cemeteries with the highest lords having the greatest number of these kinds of offerings. So we've talked about a lot about men. What about the ladies? Well, there are the San Jose de Moro burials. We're still waiting for some results of those publications of those burials. But I had the privilege of being involved at a site called Huaca Cao Viejo, at the El Brujo Archaeological Complex in the Chicama Valley where a high status woman was excavated a few years ago who was known as the Senora de Cao. Cao is the name of the site. This is like a little patio, it may have been roofed at the time, in which she was buried along with other high ranking individuals.

[00:42:09.34] And the this is a representation of the Senora played by an actor. And it demonstrates the artifacts found in her grave. There were actually a number of these frontlets found. About three or four of them. But what's fascinating is that this woman, who probably died around the age of 25 unfortunately maybe little older, was gendered as both male and female. So as female, she was buried with these long spindles with little spindle whorls on them. And if you know about textiles, a spindle whorl this small with a spindle that long, must have been for very, very finely spun cotton. And golden needles. Wow. Golden needles to sew with. And weaving and textile work has been described as the quintessential women's role in the Andes. So if that was true for the Moche, she's clearly being gendered even with high status weaving or textile equipment as female when it comes to these materials.

[00:43:28.16] But also in her grave there were 44 nose ornaments. 44 of the most exquisite, beautiful examples of Moche metal work that have ever been found. And there were 23 ceremonial spear throwers. We had the world's leading expert on spear throwers, a fellow who teachers at Grinnell College come and look at the spear throwers. And he confirmed what was obvious to us is that this could never have been actually used. They were made of wood wrapped in metal. They actually looked like they were made primarily for a funeral because the metal barely hung together on the objects. It's interesting too by the way, that number 23. If it was 22, it would work. You know half of 44. I mean it will work in terms of seeing to have some kind of pattern. But we have 23. Maybe one was the actual one she had.

[00:44:30.80] And of course, spear throwers, warfare, male activity, and nose rings-- also male regalia. And again, it seems like the nose rings could have been linked to the idea of prestation-- that these, along with spear throwers were brought to this Senora perhaps in life or perhaps in death as an offering for her funeral. Or if she was alive as an offering period from dependent lords and perhaps ladies in other communities. And in terms of-- where are we going? Here we go. In terms of that gendering, we also have this remarkable ceramic in here tomb as well, which shows a woman with a young baby being healed or consulted by a curandera-- by a woman healer. This shawl over head is a typical depiction of a curer.

[00:45:34.82] And we normally have a hard time understanding how ceramics relate to the grave contents. There often doesn't seem to be a match between the decorations or the imagery on the vessel with the individual. But in this case, there may have been a link. So female role, male role, with the seniority cao. Reminds one of those Egyptian women pharaohs, like Nefertiti, who was female but was depicted as a male as part of the ability to establish her in a position of power. Turns out, by the way, that the people working at the El Brujo site have done facial reconstruction of the Senora's human remains. And this is a model that was made of how she may have actually appeared in life.

[00:46:30.04] So that's almost the end except a couple of other interesting things. And I saved the earliest high status burial that was ever found on the north coast of Peru to discuss last. Because it was really the Sipan burials that were the breakthrough moment for Moche studies. But back in 1946, there was something called the Viru Valley Project, which was put together by this chap here dressed in the complete archaeologist togs. Which I could dress that way. I once gave a friend a pith helmet as a going away present to Peru, and he laughed in my face. Of course, I wouldn't wear it. And they dug at a site in another valley, the Viru Valley, called Huaca de La Cruz, and found a pretty spectacular burial. Only trouble was, it was 1946. It was very hard to publish in color. And it got a studied. It got reported very well for its time.

[00:47:39.12] William Duncan Strong was actually from Columbia University, and William Bennett also was involved from Yale. And this man, Clifford Evans, wound up in the Smithsonian Institution. So it's a very famous burial. But it was published in 1952 actually, and then was never sort of re-examined. So I decided to re-examine it. And it's fascinating because if you notice, it's not got a lot of metal in it. It's got very little metal. Just a couple of items that went over the eyes and over the nose and mouth-- little pieces of gold. And it doesn't have all those gold ornaments, but it does have gourds. Gourd bowls, and lots of them, all placed over the face of this adult man who was clearly a person of importance. And the Senora de Cao actually had a gold bowl in the shape of a gourd bowl on her face. But look at this. Look at all of the ceramics. So stirrup spout ceramics are those classic Moche ceramics with a stirrup style spout. OK.

[00:48:56.85] Nine of them, and other fine ware as they say, other finally made vessels. OK. Six of them. And so forth and so on. It's actually the Huaca de la Cruz warrior priest as he's known, has more fine ceramics in them, although the quality varies, than a lot of the other burials we've been talking about. Now, unfortunately, we don't have a radiocarbon date for this guy because well, it was 1946, radiocarbon dating was just starting to be done. And no one's gone back and dated him since. But I'm working with the National Museum of Peru to actually get some remains that are still existing from the burial itself and get it radiocarbon date.

[00:49:42.60] Because I suspect that this is either an early example of a high status individual being buried with generally the same kinds of things we see in the other burials. But because perhaps, he's either early and so he doesn't have as much gold, or he's just a poor lord. You know? Just like in renaissance Europe you know everyone could be the aristocrats. Or we could have a lot of aristocrats, but they were poor aristocrats and there were rich aristocrats. So you had your title and your rank. But you're actually wealth may have varied. So maybe that he's an early lord, and so he got a lot of ceramics. Or that he was a poor lord. Or that it was some other factor involved that he got ceramics instead of gold.

[00:50:34.48] Now, what about the other 99%? We're talking about these one percenters. Well, I did a study of that too. I found all the available data I could find. And there's lots more out there. But I sort of grabbed what I could of Moche commoners. And I found 25 individuals from the Huacas de Moche itself. Again, that guy Christopher Donnan, he did amazing work. And a nearby site called Cerro Blanco. And nine individuals from a Moche settlement at Huanchaco. And now, of course, you might say, well anyone buried at the Huacas de Moche could have been elite. Well, yes, they may have been higher ranking than elsewhere. But they clearly weren't in the upper ranks of the elite as best money can be judged if you go on the basis of the artifacts. OK.

[00:51:27.39] And Huanchaco definitely was a small community by the sea. It was not a wealthy town. It was just a small settlement. And in looking at those, what I found is there's lots of stirrup spout bottles like this one. Sometimes up to eight per person. Many jars up to 35 per person. And yet, almost every burial has at least a little bit of copper. Most of that copper when it was excavated was just crumbly. Couldn't be identified as to what the object was. Sometimes it seemed to just be a little bit of copper snipped off of something. But 21 out of those 33, 34 burials had copper. And of course, a lot of these were kids-- infants. So they may not have had copper because they were infants. We're getting cut off from the video stream at 7:00. So if you're cutting off, see you later. But I'm not quite finished.

[00:52:35.19] And there were typical well known types of ceramics. These are called floreros because they look like flowerpots. This is science. These are called concheros. They used to be called corn poppers. But they never popped corn. OK. We actually don't know what they were used for. We're doing a study here at the Peabody Museum. We have a whole bunch of these. And we have fragments of them. And we're doing a study. No one's done this. I mean we were looking at the residues or trying to find residues in these kinds of vessels to see what do they actually hold. But the interesting thing is, while floreros are a pretty much distributed among everybody-- women and men. Sometimes women have more of them than men do. And even young people have them. But the concheros are found only with men. Except for one. There's one burial of an adult female supposedly that has a conchero. But you wonder, did they sex the burial right? Remains to be seen. So there's lots of stuff to be done with the 99%. You just have to go find them. And there have been some excavations. We need to do more.

[00:53:50.49] So in summary, we have high status burials. And over, and over, and over again, all of those men and even the women, at least in many cases like Senora de Cao, are buried as warriors. Now, were they real warriors in their day? Well, the women probably weren't warriors. Even the men may not have been warriors. But they were buried as warriors. So interestingly enough, the art interpretations suggested priestly roles for these elites because on the pottery they are often shown in these ritual poses of exchanging goblets presumably of human blood and things like that. But if you look at the archaeological evidence, it suggests that what they are being represented as is warriors.

[00:54:44.70] Which is why I think it's appropriate to call them kings and queens. OK. Because now, that's our term. And it's not their term. We don't know what their language was actually. And it's always a question of on the one hand, if you call them kings and queens, are you basically imposing a Western European concept on an ancient culture in which things were conceived very differently. You could argue that. On the other hand, not to call them kings and queens when the evidence seems to be very strong that these people were taking on political roles, seems to be denying them a generic role that seems to fit them and seems to be common the world over. In other words, we used the term kings and queens loosely to refer to all sorts of kinds of rulers around the world who have power even though their names may be different and their exact political roles may be different. But it generically works. So I'm calling them kings and queens. My wife and I argue about this all the time. But I'm open to discussion.

[00:55:52.31] I just wanted to end by saying that Harvard University is pursuing Moche studies in many different ways-- not just my studies. So we have Michele Koons, I like to think of a recent PhD, who did an amazing study of a small Moche site called the Licapa II. And found out very interesting things such as that a distinctive ceramic style followed the canal system in the valley. So it may be that the ceramics, although there does seem to be some relationship to changes through time, might have been more related to a community that was strung out along irrigation systems. And we have Ari Caramanica, a current graduate student, who's doing amazing work on reconstructing ancient landscapes, and doing landscape archaeology in the Chicama Valley, work that relates to El Ninos, and flooding, and relates directly to contemporary concerns as well as ancient ones.

[00:56:57.81] So these studies are not just to produce interesting cocktail talk. They do relate to fundamental issues about where we came from, how we changed, how people organize themselves politically in the past, and how they confronted the problems of just everyday life as well as the extraordinary ones like El Ninos. So I thank you for your attention. And I'm willing to take questions. Thanks.