Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru by Joanne Pillsbury (Editor)

Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peruby Anonymous

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January 22, 2008: Joanne Pillsbury does an adequate job detailing the people known as the Moche. In her book: Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru she takes you through the beginning of these people lost. They built huge and bizarre pyramids that still dominate the surrounding countryside some well over a hundred feet tall. Many are so heavily eroded they look like natural hills only close up can you see they are made up of millions of mud bricks. Several of the pyramids, known as 'huacas', meaning sacred site in the local Indian dialect, contain rich collections of murals depicting both secular and sacred scenes from the Moche world. Others house the elaborate tombs of Moche leaders. Out in the desert, archaeologists have also found the 2,000-year-old remains of an extensive system of mud brick aqueducts which enabled the Moche to tame their desert environment. Many are still in use today. Indeed there are signs that the Moche irrigated a larger area of land than farmers in Peru do now. But who were the Moche? How did they create such an apparently successful civilization in the middle of the desert, what kind of a society was it, and why did it disappear? For decades it was one of the greatest archaeological riddles in South America. But now at last, scientists are beginning to come up with answers. As archaeologists have excavated at Moche sites they've unearthed some of the most fabulous pottery and jewelry ever to emerge from an ancient civilization. All very well illustrated in Joanne Pillsbury's Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru. The Moche were pioneers of metal working techniques like gilding and early forms of soldering. These skills enabled them to create extraordinarily intricate artifacts earrings and necklaces, nose rings and helmets, many heavily inlaid with gold and precious stones. But it was the pottery that gave the archaeologists their first real insight into Moche life. The Moche left no written record but they did leave a fabulous account of their life and times in paintings on pots and vessels. Many show everyday events and objects such as people, fish, birds and other animals. Others show scenes from what, at first sight, look like a series of battles. But as the archaeologists studied them more closely they realized they weren't ordinary battles all the soldiers were dressed alike, the same images were repeated time and again. When the battle was won, the vanquished were ritually sacrificed their throats cut, the blood drained into a cup and the cup drunk by a God-like deity. It was, the archaeologists slowly realized, a story not of war but ritual combat followed by human sacrifice.