The Moche Valley

Most of us think of South America as "the land of the Incas". Actually, the Inca culture was very late (beginning about 1400) and very short-lived (ending with the Spanish conquest in the early 1500s.) There is a tremendous richness of pre-Incan cultures that deserve more appreciation. The Moche culture flourished in northern Peru from about AD 100 to AD 850. Today we visited an important site of the Moches, the Huaca (Temple) of the Sun and the Huaca of the Moon, near Trujillo. These are enormous pyramids made of mud bricks (in the case of the Huaca del Sol, 140,000,000 of them!) Much of the material culture of the Moche, their ornaments and wonderful ceramics, have been lost to looters and grave robbers, but the Huaca de la Luna preserves a record of Moche culture in the form of mud friezes on the walls of the temple. These tell the tale of a fearsome fanged deity, "The Decapitator", who demanded human sacrifices lest he bring severe rains (now we call them El Niño rains) to the Moche Valley. The Huaca de la Luna was apparently a site of these sacrifices. Here the Decapitator looks out from the wall of the temple, gazing over 1,500 years of time and who knows how many El Niño cycles, his colors still vibrant, his figure still invoking fear. Apparently, the sacrifices did not appease the Decapitator. It is believed that the Moche culture ended in a series of severe El Niño events around 900 AD.