Peru - Moche

Director: Claude CHAUCHAT (C. N. R. S.)

The Moche Site

Located on the northern desert coast of Peru, a short distance from the Pacific Coast and near the modern city of Trujillo, the site is the largest settlement of the Moche or Mochica culture (3rd to 8th century of our era). The site extends across nearly 1 square kilometre and is composed of two sets of terraced platforms, Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna , separated by an urban area with agglutinated but relatively planned architecture in terms of layout.

The Moche Culture

The Moche society was complex in organisation, encompassing several valley-oases along the coast, with its cohesion based on strong political and religious power, born from the need for major irrigation works to maintain the farming production. As a society, it was familiar with ceramics, but also with cooper and gold metalworking, used by the specialised craft workshops over which the State kept close watch, and a stratified social structure under the guidance of a divinised class of leaders, in which the warrior class was particularly valued. Regularly-held ritual combats would end with sacrificial offering of the vanquished to the divinities of a pantheon in which half-man half-animal monsters abounded, depicted as predators ready to decapitate their victims, slit their throats and drink their blood.

The French Mission’s Dig

The site has been under study since 1991, by a Peruvian team from the National University of Trujillo, the Proyecto Huacas del Sol y de la Luna, headed by Professors Santiago UCEDA and Ricardo MORALES, after bas-reliefs and raw clay paintings were discovered on Huaca de la Luna; these are now on display to tourists. At the same time, work is ongoing to unearth the Huaca and the urban area. Ever since the institution of this large-scale programme (including dig, restoration and showcasing), the site is under surveillance night and day, presented to the public, and small buildings have been erected at the edge of the site to introduce it to visitors. A large site museum is being planned.

The French Mission, which has been involved in the programme since 1999, is focusing on an intermediary zone between the major monument, the Huaca, and the urban zone. It measures nearly one hectare and includes a low-set platform and a number of dependencies that had already yielded several tombs, attributable to elite figures in the Moche society. The purpose of the dig was first to explore the funeral area and, in particular, to study the human remains, offerings and funeral rites enabling us to better assess this group of sepulchres. The cleaning and clearing of the architecture, carried out at the same time, made it possible to also study the details and show that, originally, the architecture did not have any funerary function.