The Ancients - Ancient Americas: The Moche

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Known for their iconic ceramics and notable artwork - the Moche people flourished in ancient northern Peru. But who were the people behind the clay?In this special bonus episode of our Ancient Americas series, Tristan is joined by Doctor Jeffrey Quilter from Harvard University to tell us more about this incredible society. Temples, tombs and treasure - what do we know from these sources about the Moche, and what can we still learn?For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, while we are continuing our Ancient Americas series, we're releasing two episodes this week because it's a special ending to our mini-series all about the Ancient Americas this August. It's been wonderful to see how well-received episodes like the Maya Calendar, Teotihuacan,

and the Olmec Heads have been. And don't you worry, we've got a few more episodes being released all about the Ancient Americas because it is such an extraordinary area of our ancient world. Today we're heading to South America, to northern Peru, to the second most well-known pre-Columbian culture from this area of the world. I'm not talking about the Inca, I'm talking all about the Moche culture which thrived in this area of northern Peru from the first to around the 6th, 7th, 8th centuries AD or CE. And to talk all about the Moche culture today, I was delighted to get on the podcast Dr. Geoffrey Quilter from Harvard University. Geoffrey, wonderful to get on the podcast. He's a lovely guy and he knows so much about the Moche culture, about their ceramics,

about how they lived, about the whole nature of the Moche society, what we know, what we're still learning from the archaeology and why it's such an exciting area of archaeology for those looking to study this area of the ancient world in the years ahead. So without further ado, to talk all about the Moche culture, here's Geoffrey. Geoff, it's great to have you on the podcast. Oh, it's great to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me. Well, you're very welcome indeed. And for a topic like this, the Moche. And Jeff, the Inca aside, it feels like the Moche, they're among the best known South American archaeological cultures. Well, that's absolutely true. And the reason is that triumvirate that

is constantly cited in an old fashioned kind of way, temples, tombs and treasure. And one more thing, which is the ceramics or the pots. And as early as the 19th century, a rather famous chap named Ephraim George Squire, who did research in, pioneering research in North America, Central America, and South America, was the first person in the Anglo world to note the spectacular ceramics that he found on the north coast of Peru. And so, well, you mentioned Peru there. So let's set the scene with the background straight away. Whereabouts in the Andes in South America are we talking when talking all things Moche? Well, the Moche are part of a larger world, which we call the Central Andes, because it encompasses much more than just one country.

And it's usually defined as the footprint of South America, all the way to about 200 miles into the coastal Chile, and from the Pacific coast as far east as northwestern Argentina. So it was a huge area. A colleague of mine once said that if you place the Inca Empire's footprint on Europe, it would stretch from London at one end and Tehran at the other. And in the same sense, and when you think of that area in the old world, the diversity of cultures in any one time, not to mention through time, is enormous, including hundreds of languages and hundreds of ethnic groups. And the Moche were one of them, although the term itself is an artifact because we don't know what they call themselves. Lots of scholars call them Moche. Some call them Mochica. Moche, some call them Mochica. It has partly to do with the difference between an older term, which was based upon a language known as Muchique, or sometimes just Moche, or Mochica,

and then referring to the archaeological tradition of naming archaeological cultures after places. And the Moche Valley is one of the heartlands of that realm. And it stretches, the Moche region stretches from over about 500 miles from the northern central coast of Peru, all the way up to the Satura Desert on the very far north of the coast. The heartland, however, was three or four valleys around the modern city of Trujillo, Spanish named it after the Trujillo in Spain, Pizarro's birthplace, and up north to another city known as Chiclayo. and up north to another city known as Chiclayo. And I think one important thing to realize is that this is mostly a coastal and desert culture.

The coast of Peru is a desert because of the Humboldt or Peruvian current, the cold water current that runs along a good section of northern Chile and most of Peru. And that creates a desert on the coast, the rains fall on the highlands, the second highest mountain range in the world, the Andes. And then on the other side is the tropical forest. So those are the three large climatic and geographical and environmental zones of the region. The Moche were mostly on the coast, and they were dependent upon irrigation agriculture based upon the rivers that came from the mountains down to the ocean. Those valleys can be imagined as a thin river coming out of the mountains and then spreading out in a fan-like shape as they enter the coast. And it was in those fans in particular that the Moche prospered and did their thing.

So today, almost in a sense, if we're talking about some 2,000 years ago, was there irrigation techniques? Did they almost manage to farm this desert-like topography by the coast? Oh, yes. Irrigation, the exact date of early irrigation is, again, always under investigation and always being revised. But the evidence seems to be that as early as the late pre-ceramic period. So around about 1500, 1800 BC, irrigation was already being used. It grew in its complexity and extent, of course, over the years. Wow. Well, there you go. We'll get more into that as the podcast goes along, no doubt. But let's keep on a bit more

of the Moche and the early story of the Moche, because what precedes the Moche or the Moche in this part of the world? What do we think? I'm going to let you go crazy here, Jeff, because I know there's a bit of debate, there's a bit of mystery around this part. Well, I think, you know, part of the reason why I'm interested in the Moche is because they are a strictly archaeological culture. So everything we can say about them is based on archaeology. There's a little bit we can say based upon extending back from the historic period, but since the Moche were defunct by about 900 AD, that's a long period of time before the Spanish arrived, and therefore a long period of time before the Spanish arrived, and therefore a long period

of time before we have written records, because the Moche did not have any form of writing. They appear in the archaeological record around 200 to 300 AD, and they, as I just said, disappear around about 900 or so. Prior to them, there were millennia of cultures, very complex cultures, all along the coast and in the highlands and also in the tropical forest of Peru. And as in all parts of the world, when we speak of archaeology, our knowledge and the things we can say about the past tends to be less, and what we can say tends to be less because the evidence is harder to find and it's harder to interpret, and the human footprint is faint on the landscape. So we know that humans in this region, it happens to be one of the regions in which we have some of the earliest evidence of humans in the New World.

14,000 years ago, 12,000 BC, maybe a little earlier by a couple of thousand years, is our first evidence of humans in this region. and by about 3000, we have fair numbers of sites and evidence of various differences in culture groups. And then things really kick off with the presence of pottery. Not so much because of the pottery itself, of course, but because archaeologists finally have more to study since pottery preserved itself. That's called the initial period. I think one thing to keep in mind is that Peruvian and Andean archaeology tends to be based upon concepts of periods of integration in which large areas of the Andes were sharing common ideas, sometimes united under a common political system of some sort, like the Inca at the end, and then periods when there was more regionalization. And even though the Moche stretched

over a goodly stretch of about 500 miles of coast, they're in one of those regional periods. We call it the early intermediate period because they were preceded by something called the initial period when the ceramics first get used. And it's at that time that we get huge temples, deliberately painted and decorated and with lots of evidence of rites and rituals and religious ideas. and rituals and religious ideas. And that system was around for, oh, about a thousand years or more. And then there was a consolidation of one of these centers known as Chavin de Huantar, located in the central highlands of Peru, which seems to have created a religious system and a pilgrimage center that helped to unite or unify in one way or another lots of different peoples in different parts of Peru. And that Chavin culture was very influential, as I said, over a long period of time from

about 800 BC to about 1 AD is the general time period, which we call the early horizon. And then Chavin stops. It falls apart. The center is abandoned. It's a spectacular sight to see in the highlands of Peru near the city of Huaraz. And we know that we have this image from the archaeology of barbarians camping in the Forum, just like in Rome, happening at Chavin. So whatever Chavin was, falls apart. And then there's this sort of dark age where things are rather unclear as to what happens. And out of this come the Moche eventually. Why did Chabin collapse? Well, as in many things, we really don't know. But there are lots of ideas. One is, and of course, it's a commonly used idea, was that there was some major environmental change. Perhaps a series

of massive rain events on the coast and droughts in the highlands due to the fluctuations in the Humboldt Current when it's overridden by warmer waters, known as an El Nino event, something I think more and more people are becoming aware of, which actually a lot of that basic research was done off the coast of Peru. Out of that dark ages of uncertainty and obscurity in terms of the archaeology, we get the Moche. And there are a couple of earlier cultures before them, one called Salinar and one called Gainazo, that seem to be predecessors and also overlap with early Moche. They seem to overlap with the early Moche, but it's the Moche of those cultures, Jeff, that really rises to the fore. So I'm guessing we're not quite sure, therefore,

what happens to the Salinar, to the Gallinazo cultures, do we? Yes, Salinar seems to be earlier and is defunct, probably, apparently, before Moche. Gallinazo seems to have been some kind of rival. And part of the problem is that we know these cultures, again, primarily based upon ceramics and sites. So relationships, political and social relationships, are much harder to detect. There does seem to be some evidence of conflict between Gainazo, which was based on a very large site in the Viru Valley, with the original Moche, at least what we think of as the fairly early Moche, located in the Moche Valley and in the Chicama Valley to its north. So we should keep in mind that these valleys are, they're sort of, they're like rungs on a ladder if you look at the coast of Peru. And so we have these roughly parallel river valleys

with desert in between them. Right. Well, okay, well, let's delve into the Moche world itself now. And huge area, as you were saying, but do we have any idea, therefore, about the political structure of the Moshe, how these people interacted with each other? What do we know about how they lived, how they interacted? Well, that's one of my favorite topics. And there's been an evolution of thought in this. And again, it's based upon the fact that we only can understand these archaeologically. So as is the case, I think, in most scholarly studies, the more we know, the more complicated things seem to get. So let's say in the 19th century, in the late 19th century, we didn't

even know that the Moche were a separate culture. They were combined and thought of as part of one large culture on the north coast of Peru, based upon who the Spanish encountered and talked to in the region. The Inca had only conquered the north coast of Peru very briefly, maybe less than a century before the Spanish arrived. And the Inca told the Spanish that there had been this previous culture called Chimú, the kingdom of Chumor, actually, that they had conquered. And so we knew that. And so any artifacts that were found that were not Inca on the north coast of Peru were called Chimú. But soon, even in the 19th century, it became clear that there was a ceramic style that seemed to be distinct within this Chimú culture, and that was called Proto-Chimú.

And it was only until the 1930s and 40s that a really remarkable man named Rafael Larco Oyle, a really remarkable man named Rafael Larco Oyle, that is the Spanish-pronunciated nation, we would pronounce it Hoyle, who was a hacienda owner in the Moche Valley, so he was in prime location. And he was the first person to distinguish Protochimu as Moche. So the concept of Moche only began then. And he thought of Moche as a single state that stretched from those 500 miles throughout the coast of Peru. And that it was a, he was working, of course, the 30s, and early 20th century models of large state systems in which the religious system and the political system were all very much modeled on Europe. Now, through a lot of research, we know things are much more complex. This was a culture that lasted for several hundred years.

We can't assume that it was the same at the beginning as it was at the end, which is something that we understand for any culture. Of course, Rafael Larco didn't even have radiocarbon dates. So he was working simply on the basis of, you know, what he could interpret from the artifacts. So we now think that, and I think this is one of the most exciting things about Moche archaeology today, is that we now have reached a point where we realize that this was a very complex world. And in some ways, I'd like to use the model, though it's dangerous to use, of, it was sort of like the ancient Greek world in which you had something like city-states, and they were

interacting in very complex ways, just like we know about ancient Greece, in which you had periods in which certain centers became very powerful. They allied with others. Then those alliances collapsed. They conquered others and so forth. The answer seems to be that, yes, we know a lot, but we also know very little. But no, it's a really interesting comparison that you bring there, Jeff, because it's almost, if you bring, you know, the Greek world and the world of the city states as of such and i know as you say it's sometimes you know a big overview so of course there'll be differences but almost as if there is this shared overarching culture some shared ideas and beliefs but you can see

this variation this diversity between these various urban centers. Yes, I've really benefited from, you know, my feeble but nevertheless useful readings in classical archaeology and the classical world, as I learned from your podcast quite a bit, in using ideas about, you know, these kinds of complexities. For example, we know that the Greeks all had similar pantheons of deities, but they called them different names. And of course, some city-states had Athena as their primary deity and others had somebody else, Apollo, for example. And I think that the evidence is suggesting something similar again not not exactly but something similar from the moche there was a pantheon of deities um but they got emphasized

in terms of who was important and who got a lot of attention who was the principal deity locally opposed to somewhere else it's so interesting indeed you know that as you mentioned that difference but also similarity at the same time. And just so we get a bit more of an idea, these urban centres that these people were based in, what do we know about these urban centres? Because I've got in my notes here the word Huaca, and please correct me if I'm saying that wrong, but do explain. Written as W-A-K-A sometimes. You know, again, they didn't have writing either, so we work as we can with using European alphabet. Waka is an Inca word, actually, a Quechua word, and it can be glossed as something sacred.

It's actually, there are books written about this, and extensive lectures can be given about the concept of waka, and there's lots to be given about the concept of Waka. And there's lots to be said about it. But in its simplest terms, you can think of it as something that's sacred, powerful. It has a specific use in many parts of Peru as meaning what we would call a temple mound or a structure of some kind. temple mound or a structure of some kind. Sometimes, of course, interestingly, many of these archaeological sites in ruins are considered as powerful and in some sense as sacred today by local people. So they're respected in many cases, in almost all cases. So it means something sacred. It has a sort of particular use on the north coast of Peru

referring to a large truncated pyramid. So like a ziggurat, again, to use an old world example, they were made of adobe bricks. Adobe is a fancy word for mud, but it was a special kind of mud. You couldn't get it anywhere. Actually, people had to go to a lot of trouble to find just the right kind of clay-y mud to be able to make bricks. And the bricks were piled up into sections, and the sections were combined into producing these solid structures. So they did not have interior rooms. They were solid structures that were usually accessed at the top by a ramp, often made like a ziggurat in terraces. And this has been one of the most spectacular aspects of Moche archaeology since the 1980s, late 80s into the 90s. I mean, it's amazing. In some ways, it's only been 30 years that

Moche archaeology has really exploded in that we've been able to find these massive temples painted in spectacular colors and with amazing figures on them of these deities and other very strange things like warriors marching prisoners to sacrifice. It's just the tops, you know. I mean, one of the things that I'm trying to encourage in people is to, you know, Machu Picchu is high on people's bucket list to go see, but there's so much more to see. And the north coast of Peru is the place to see it because these temples are just spectacular

and they're being excavated by Peruvian archaeologists who are doing spectacularly excellent jobs in preserving them and in protecting them so that they can be seen by the public. Yeah, no, absolutely, Jeff. Well, let's keep going into it now because I've got like a good case study of one of these urban centers like Huaca de Moche. What is this? And talk to us about the temples there, but also some of these other key architectural features that you can see at this site, what we know from this urban center. Well, the Waukesha Moche is the largest Moche site that we know of. It has two massive temples that are about 500 meters apart with a huge space between them. And the largest of the two huacas is called the Huaca del Sol. Again, we don't know what the Moche called it, but it's called the Huaca del Sol, the Temple of the Sun. It's over 1,000 feet long, and it's about a hundred feet high and it's this massive building

and it must have taken thousands of people to build it. Except that there's good evidence that these temples that I've been describing were built in stages. So it achieved its greatest height at the end of its use, shortly, whatever. It may have been a generation or two generations, but it achieved its height only at the very end of its growth. And then across the 500 meters to the other side is the Huaca de la Luna, the Temple of the Moon. It's also a spectacular, very large, one of these terraced mounds with a platform on the top and then a large plaza in front of it. And it's interesting because the archaeologist, the late Santiago Uceda, a wonderful Peruvian archaeologist who spent most of his life excavating in this Huacas de Mocha complex, thought that the Huaca de la Luna was probably built first. And it was the main temple there. There's also, between the two Huacas, an urban area, other platforms, other temples,

and so forth. But in some ways, the Huacas de Moche is a wonderful site, not only because of its size, not only because of the amazing painted surfaces of these warriors and deities and so forth and so on, but also because it kind of chronicles the whole Moche story. Because according to Santiago's interpretation, which I agree with, it's indubitable, the Huacateluna was built first. It also went through a period of growth. It had about four major building stages. And this happened probably in the early, maybe the earliest would be the mid-200s AD. And then it had, as I said, a succession of stages added to it, so it got bigger. And then around AD 650, sometime in the second half of the 7th century, there was no more building of that site. It may have still been in use, but it was no longer expanded or built upon anymore.

And a new temple was built close to it, a smaller one, but still impressive structure. And then at some time later, the Huaca del Sol, 500 meters away across the plain, the Huaca del Sol was dramatically expanded. It had been built in stages before, but it suddenly became huge. And it seems that the center of interest, if you will, or activity at the site shifted from the Huaca de la Luna to the Huaca del Sol. And that the change seems to have been related to different religious practices and probably social and political ones as well, in which the Guadalupe, which was a ceremonial center, they had prisoner sacrifices there, they had large peoples coming in and having big

celebrations of various kinds, usually probably fueled by some kind of psychotropic drug, perhaps, or lots of chicha, the maize beer that is often used in Andean festivals today. And those kinds of ceremonies stopped, and a different kind of system, religious system perhaps, political system, was being emphasized more at the other waka on the waka no soul so that's it except that we didn't talk about the urban area well actually i'm going to ask to kind of keep on that because you've hinted at i want to kind of keep on that pre-650 ad moche time now because i think the focus of this one podcast but to kind of keep on the purpose of that you mentioned these, you mentioned all these various rituals and activities that would have occurred at the

top of these temples. And there's one piece of artwork that I've got in my notes I'd like you to talk about, because it seems to relate very much to this. And this is the sacrifice ceremony. Now, Geoff, what is this and what can we learn from it? Well, let me go back a little bit. This scene that you described, the sacrifice ceremony, was first known primarily from painted pottery and a mural. And it shows a group of deities, mostly anthropomorphic deities. So individuals dressed, some of them dressed like anthropomorphic birds and a woman. She's clearly anomorphic. She doesn't have any zoomorphic features. Presenting a cup to a larger figure who used to be called the ray deity,

because he has these sort of rays emanating from him in a lot of the art. And the art was painted, as I said, on a mural at a site called Pana Marca, which is one of the southernmost Moche Ceremonial Center, and also on pottery. Because there's two major kinds of pottery. There's the painted pottery, in which there's very fine-lined painted images, and then there are sculptural forms in which you have modeled figures. And so there have been studies done that show that this sacrifice ceremony has been interpreted, well, the name changed from the presentation theme

because it was based upon the presentation of this goblet to this deity, or a priest dressed like a deity. It was changed to the sacrifice ceremony because the initial idea, the initial vision that created this idea of the presentation theme was based solely on the art. There was this major change in Moche archaeology in the late 80s, early 90s, in which we started finding more of these spectacular tombs of high-status individuals, elites, kings and queens, perhaps, or high priests. And they were sometimes buried, often buried, with the regalia that were seen in these depictions. So one of the key elements in this presentation theme or sacrifice ceremony is a ceremonial cup, which looks like a

chalice. I mean, they almost exactly like chalices, interestingly enough, which was interpreted as containing the blood of sacrificial victims. And again, piecing together various archaeological researches, the interpretation has been, though there's still a shadow of doubt as to exactly how it might have been, that the prisoners were sacrificed. These were probably war prisoners, individuals who were captured in mock battles that were set up in order to make sure that the one team wouldn't be the loser, and they were sacrificed, and then their blood was filled with chalice. And we believe generally that there were priests and priestesses acting out this sacrifice ceremony. And we also assume that the whole ceremony was based upon a myth, was based upon a religious concept in which the scene is part of a larger narrative,

a larger story about, you know, the fundamental ideas in many, many religions. And at least, you know, one critical part of those religions is the idea of the either maintenance of the universe or of the regeneration of the universe, which is pretty much the same thing. So we think that's what, at least I think that's what it's all about. All this month on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'll be asking, who really were the Vikings? How did they become so successful in spreading across Northern Europe and beyond

from the late 8th to the 11th centuries? What are the stories we tell about them, and what legacy do they leave behind for us today? I'm Dr Kat Jarman, and throughout September, I'll be examining the big questions about the Vikings with a host of experts, and answering all of your burning questions about the Viking Age as well. So, for everything you always wanted to know about the Vikings, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. well well there you go thank you i know that was a bit of a tangent but i did on my notes i want

to talk about it i love to talk about teams but let's go back because otherwise we're going to go too much down that rabbit hole let's go back back to Pachas de Moche and the urban area, the urban buildings. We talked about the temples. What do we therefore know about, I guess, the residential area of this great city? Yes, well, the residential area is, interestingly enough, all close to the Huacadilla Luna, although it's a relatively late phenomenon. In other words, this residential area was not, it's hard to know if what the residential nature of the site was early in its history, but late in its history, so maybe in the 6th century or, you know, the early 7th century, there was a town or city perhaps with streets in it that consisted of very large compounds. So these would be mud brick walled units that would measure tens

of meters on a side and consist of sectors within them of rooms and patios and other spaces. And in them, we found artifacts that suggest daily life. But these were probably elite people. Also, underneath the floors, we find the burials of individuals. So they were buried in their compounds. One of the interesting things is that, again, this is all pioneering work done by Santiago Seda and his team. The compounds seem to be self-sufficient. They seem to be independent units that aren't linked to, in other words, they were set up kind of like cells, which each one was

its own thing. You know, European cities and old world cities tend to be organized in terms of districts in which you have the leather workers in one place, the ceramicists in another place, the potters in another place, and so forth and so on. That doesn't seem to be present at the site. It tends to be, each unit produced its own pottery, perhaps. It did its own food preparation. We don't find any evidence of agricultural tools in them. So it means to say that these people were probably high status and someone was bringing in food elsewhere. I think that's one critical thing. There were these urban areas, but they seem to be, and even the WACA centers themselves, had to have been dependent upon rural people because the

food was being grown elsewhere. One of the curious things about the largest Waka centers is that they're the end of the irrigation system. So if they're at the end of the irrigation systems, they're actually in the weakest position you could possibly be. Because if you're up valley, you can control the water of the people down valley. So this links urbanization, the religious centers, the irrigation and agriculture and everything else all together. In the sense that one idea is there was actually a my archaeologist back in the 1970s named William Rathje who wrote an article called Praise the God and Pass the Metates. And his argument was that, it's a simplistic argument, but it's an interesting one, that the Maya developed all of their pyramids and all their complex religion because they were in a actually resource-poor area. And so they sort of invented these temple centers to attract pilgrims because it

was a way to sort of make a living, if you will. And again, now my inner archaeologist, that idea really doesn't work anymore. It's much more complicated. Again, the more we know, the more complicated things get. But I think the basic idea that people in marginal areas often have to be creative in terms of inventing things and creating things in order to get access to things that aren't available elsewhere. And what better thing to create than a complex religion ceremonial center where you can go and get drunk and see the sacrifices and have a great time at the casino, well, they didn't have casinos, but same idea, right, than to go to a big temple center. So we don't even know, for example, if the urban centers were occupied year round, because one thing we do know about people in Peru is that they're highly

mobile. Even today, people leave the hot interior valleys in the summertime and they move to the coast, spend the summer on the coast, which makes perfect sense. Very civilized. Well, do we know anything, Jeff, about more rural settlements then, therefore, where people were living outside of these big urban centers? Do these seem, once again, in many ways, do these seem actually to be more important? Well, that's also a great question and an interesting one, because the answer is no, we don't know much. And part of the reason is that Moche archaeology is very funny kind of discipline, because we started out knowing a lot about the pots and looking at

all the pots as one big corpus that was indistinguishable. No, we had no temporal controls. We just looked at the pots and, you know, cherry picked one pot or another and studied them that way. And then there was this kind of switch in the 1990s where suddenly all these big tombs got excavated. So we know a lot about the elites, too. Part of that's because a lot of the archaeologists, I mean there's complex reasons, but one of the reasons is a lot of the archaeologists thought that the looters

had gotten all the temples and all the gold and all the big burials, so they never dug these big sites. But then it turns out, well, it turns out the looters are not as any brighter than the archaeologists. They missed a lot of the big tombs. And so Peruvian archaeologist named Walter Alva in 1987 found this spectacular tomb that was being looted. And that really changed the game altogether. So Moche Archaeology, we know a lot about the pots and a lot about the religion in some ways. And we know a lot about the elite, the high status individuals. We have about six major elites that have been excavated. That is the main figure. Sometimes they're buried with their retainers and so on and so on. What we don't know a lot about is that sector in between,

which you just mentioned, which is to say, what were the rural communities like? And the archaeology of that has just not been done extensively we had no little bit but not much not much but more to learn in the future no doubt but okay then well let's move on you mentioned pots there we haven't touched the ceramics yet so let's therefore go on to ceramics because this feels such an iconic part of the moche culture doesn't it i mean so what do we know about moche ceramic production we know a lot and we know very little. Again, we know how the pots were made. That's to say, how they took the clay and how they made it.

They used molds to a great extent. Interestingly, the molds were piece molds, so that it wasn't like you used liquid clay and cast the entire pot. You cast pieces of the pot and then assemble them. That's why we often have Moche pots that look similar to one another because you can use these piece molds that say produce a particular kind of body vessel or maybe a particular kind of little ornament that's attached to it and you can use it over and over again and then paint it differently. The pots are earthenware, so they're made of a low-fired clay. They're not made of porcelain or they didn't have glazes.

No New World culture at all had glazes until some evidence of very late, like maybe late 15th century glazes in New Mexico. But that's it. Otherwise, they were treated with burnishing or polishing that would make them shine. They were slip painted often. Moche pots are distinctive because they were usually made with a sort of red colored earth, a brown colored earth, fired in an oxidizing temperature so that the clay would be relatively light colored but then usually most mochi pots the paints can completely covers the vessel they used only two primary colors which is well it ranges from brown to red to maroon to orange that range of colors and then a cream

color or cream to white color usually the most common one would be a cream colored slip over the red natural colors, clay, a fire clay, and then painted or molded decorations on them. And then of course, the other thing that's very distinctive about the moche pots is the stirrup spout, which is, to visualize this, imagine a single spout, but at the base of the spout, it divides in two and curves into the body vessel. So it looks like a stirrup. That's why it's called that. And the stirrup spout shape is almost certainly, I would say, I think everyone agrees on this, is an expression of a deep fundamental Andean concept of dualism. All of the cultures of

ancient Peru, and still to this day, have this concept of dualism, two things coming together to form one. Or my colleague Richard Berger, who's an expert on Chivine, and his wife, Lucy Salazar Berger, have talked about asymmetric dualism. That is to say that it's often, it's like a yin-yang, although sometimes the yin-yang is imbalanced. So there is a slightly stronger and slightly weaker relationship. But in order to get anything done, in order for anything to happen, in order for the universe to move, there has to be a pair, and they have to relate as individuals that come together as one. Thus, for example, the joining of two tributaries into one river is a key point. Often you find big sites located at most points because it's the union of the two into one. And now the Moche don't seem to be asymmetric dualists, but rather, you know, the equal sides because the pots have that symmetry.

the pots are these model figures of deities and warriors and many other figures, which of course have what has fascinated everyone from Ephraim George Squire down to today. And let's focus in particular on one of the finest of these motley ceramic types, which are these portrait head vessels. Now, Geoff, take it away. What exactly are these? Well, the name says it all. Portrait head vessels are these ceramic vessels that are marvels of what appear to be portraiture. Very distinct individuals with features often, nevertheless, with stirrup spouts on the top of their heads. It seemed like having a stirrup spout was something that really kind of empowered or imbued the pot with some kind of sacrality, although some portrait head vessels don't have the stirrup spout. But nevertheless, they seem to represent individuals. Now, again, going back to the theme of the more we know, the less we know, the more complicated things get. It was once thought that any pot that showed a face and most of the head of an individual

was a portrait of a specific individual, some ancient Moche person. I think now the general opinion is that things are more, as I, complex, because if you actually took all the pots in any collection that are supposedly portraits, you would see that some are rather stock figures. Some are not very good. There's lots of moche pots that aren't very good. We tend to see the best ones because museums don't want to show the mediocre ones. They put the best ones out. There are plenty of moche pots that weren't particularly well done. And some of them don't seem to be portraits. They seem to be basically, you know, sort of cranked out stock images. That's one class. Then there's another class in which there seem to be maybe heroes or characters of some sort. There's a famous one that

my colleague, Christopher Donnan, who has really been the person who's done the most outstanding work on Moche pots, as well as a master archaeologist himself, is called Cutlip because the individual has a distinctive cut on his lip. And there are actually versions of Cutlip, as he's called, in which he's shown as a youth, and then as an older sort of teenager, and then as a young adult, and then as an old adult. And then he's shown as being sacrificed. Well, if he's sacrificed, I think it's more like Hercules. Maybe it wasn't an individual who actually lived. I mean, who was Hercules anyhow? You know, we don't know. Was he a real person? Or was he based on a real person? Alexander the Great's another example. He was supposedly a real person, but he becomes

mythologized. So I think we're dealing with a class of these portrait heads that's kind of like that too. And then there are some that really do seem like they were just, they seem to be portraits. Chris thinks that they were probably only made very briefly and in the Moche Valley, I believe. So there's still lots to learn. There's still lots to learn. I wish I could then ask you about the erotic vessels and like we've got to move on because there's not much more time. Well, I can say that the erotic vessels are probably not simply for, you know, pornographic enjoyment. They probably have some symbolic use and reason.

Absolutely. If you want to learn more about that you dirty minded people you can go and have a look online and okay we're moving on but i said just the last thing on these ceramics because they are so fascinating do we just find them in moche territory or were they traded further afield we find them in nazca territory nearby or further up in mesoamerica like these the any types of these vessels portrait vessels or any types of pottery? Do we find them, I guess, traded or transported along large distances? That's a good question. It's actually something I really haven't thought about. And so you've actually given me a great thing to think about. But I think the quick answer is moche pots are mostly found in moche territory. And I think that that expresses the hermetic nature of what I like to call classic

Moche culture, as I say, early Moche culture. They were probably, again, I think you must remember that this wasn't an actual tribe of people. We don't know what they call themselves and so forth and so on. But I think it was a kind of religious ethnic group that you sort of signed up to become one. Just like pagans in Western Europe were signing up for Christianity at one point, you know, as the Romans came by, because they saw it to their advantage for one reason or another, spiritual or, you know, more practical. I think the same thing was true with Moche, that there was a heartland, which is the Chicama and Moche valleys and Viru valleys. And then there were these regions to the north and south of it,

in which people sort of said, hey, we'll do that too. And now we can trade with the folks down in Chicama or someplace like that. But you don't find a lot of, very few. There are occasional examples. For example, at the great site of Wari, actually a site nearby called Conchopata in the southern highlands of Peru, the folks that may have eventually conquered or severely influenced the Moche, there are a couple of ceramics that were found that seem to be kind of Moche-influencer-inspired, but it's actually quite rare. kind of Moche influence or inspired, but it's actually quite rare. In later Moche times, we start seeing pottery from elsewhere that is influencing the Moche, but not the other way around. Jeff, this has all been fascinating. I mean, it's just kind of an overview of the Moche.

We could talk about so many other things like the burials and so many others, but I mean, to wrap it all up, a nice ending to this pod would be, I mean, what do we think therefore happens to the Moche? Let's say in around 650 AD, there seems to be this great change which happens to them. Yes, around in the second half of the 7th century, something happens and we're not quite sure what it is. Again, a very common trope is to say that, well, there must have been some kind of environmental change. There is some evidence that sometime prior to this, there may have been a series of these

mega El Ninos, massive floods on the coast and droughts in the highlands, and may have caused a huge amount of uprooting of people, highlanders moving to the coast because of the drought, and coastal people probably were able to handle the El Ninos fairly well, but a severe mega one they would have a very hard time with. And they would certainly have a hard time of people coming in who were fleeing drought in the highlands. And then we have the rise of this megaculture, the Wari, as they're known, and based upon the site of Wari in the southern highlands of Peru, not that far from Cusco, actually, the home of the Incas. I said earlier that the Moche are part of this period, the early intermediate

period, which is a time of relative regionalization. Well, Wari is a time, the Wari culture starts to spread across the central Andes, and in much the same way as the later Inca. And in some ways, like the earlier Chavin, they start to create a world in which people are much more interconnected. And it seems that Moche was affected by this. And I am actually a firm believer that Wari dramatically affected Moche. And we're not sure exactly how. Empires are complex things in that they influence folk, both in terms of sometimes it's military, sometimes it's commercial, sometimes it's cultural.

Again, think of the Roman Empire and how even in very distant lands, I was listening to your podcast about how the Oracle of Delphi, they were at the border of Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, and there were scripts that someone had gone to the Oracle of Delphi. That's cultural, that it has that kind of reach. And Wari was the same way. It had that huge reach and it affected the Moche. And it affected it in such a way that the sort of locus of Moche centers, shifts from the southern region to the northern region.

Because one thing we didn't cover, but it's interesting, is that the Moche region is actually divided into two areas, separated by a desert, the Pampa de Paiján, north of the Chicama Valley. And we know from the colonial times that there were two languages. Now, this is colonial times, but the same area that was the southern Moche in colonial times spoke a language called Kingum. And in the northern area, north of that Pampalay Paihan Desert, in colonial times, the language that was spoken was known as Muchik or Mochi. So there probably were, since time immemorial, these cultural differences between the people on that northern section and

the southern section. And there were different kinds of moches in those regions. There was a period maybe when everyone was sharing similar ideas, but then somehow what Wari was doing, maybe abetted by their alliance with the highland culture in Cajamarca, the scene eventually of where Pizarro captures Atahualpa at the beginnings of the Spanish conquest. At that point, Wari is somehow involved with Cajamarca, and it's somehow involved with influencing or affecting Moche, and the culture changes. It's still still around but it's no longer the same thing all of those classic pottery vessels we were have been talking about aren't made anymore the ceramics become simpler and life changes as it always does as it always does indeed

well jeff this has been a great overview of the Moche. People can learn even more about it. You can go and learn even more about it by having a read of Geoff's new book, where he talks all about this and so much more. Geoff, the book is called? It's called The Ancient Central Andes, and it's published by Radlodge. Fantastic. Well, Geoff, it just goes for me to say, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

Well, thank you. It's been fun. Take care. Well, there you go. There was Dr Geoffrey Quilter explaining all about the Moche. We only really have just scratched the surface. There's so much more to explain, to talk about with the Moche. We'll have to get Geoffrey back on in the future for a follow-up episode.

And of course, if you do want to learn more, you can go and buy his book. The Moche forms a part of his book all about the ancient central Andes. Now, last things from me, you probably know what I'm going to say. If you would like more ancients content in the meantime, you know what you can do. You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter via a link in the description below. Every week I write a bit of a blurb for that newsletter explaining what's been happening in Team Ancient History Hit World that week.

And of course, if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from, we, the whole team, will be greatly appreciated as we continue our everlasting mission to spread these incredible stories from our distant past with you,

to give them the limelight that they deserve. But that's enough from me, and I'll see you in the next episode.