48
Clay pot, from Peru
AD 100–700
In Peru, a largely forgotten people have left to history not just a face, like the helmet from Sutton Hoo, but an entire three-dimensional portrait of a warrior. From this small sculpture – from the clothes and the weapons it shows, from the way it was made and buried – we can begin to reconstruct the elements of a lost civilization. That civilization could not possibly have had any contact with the societies flourishing in Europe and Asia at around the same time – but, astonishingly, it shows a great number of similarities with them.
History has been kind to only a few American cultures. The Aztecs and the Incas have an unshakable place in our collective imagination, but few of us know where the Moche are from. Experts in early American history are now slowly recovering the civilizations that ran in parallel with, and were every bit as sophisticated as, their most advanced European counterparts. The Moche are at the centre of that rethinking of the American past.
Around 2,000 years ago the Moche people built a society that incorporated probably the first real state structure in the whole of South America. It was a civilization that developed in the narrow strip of almost desert land between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains, and it lasted more than 800 years – roughly from the time of the expansion of Rome around 200 BC to the Islamic conquests around AD 650. The history of that civilization is accessible to us now only through archaeology, as the Moche left no writing. But what we do have from them is pots.
In the Enlightenment gallery at the British Museum we have an array of these South American pots on show. They are more than 1,300 years old and make an extraordinary sight ranged on the shelves: a series of small clay sculptures about 23 centimetres (9 inches) high, brown with cream painting on them. They conjure up a whole world. There are a pair of owls, a bat, a sealion eating a fish; there are priests and warriors; and all of them sit like small sculptures, but with a looped handle and a spout because, as well as being statues, they are jugs. This is a pottery representation of the Moche universe.
The pot I have chosen to take us further into that world of Peru 1,300 years ago is in the form of a young Moche warrior, kneeling. In his right hand he holds something that looks quite like a microphone but is actually a club, literally a head cracker, and on his left forearm he carries a small circular shield. His skin is a deep copper colour, and his eyes are staring white with an arresting gaze.
Besides using the pots to obtain information about the society they represent, we can of course admire them simply as great works of art. The Moche were master potters, so their creations can best be judged by another master potter, the Turner Prize-winning Grayson Perry:
They’re beautifully modelled: they almost look like they’ve been burnished. If I wanted to get this effect, I’d probably use the back of a spoon, but they’ve probably used some sort of bone implement. They were experts in mould technology, and they used a lot of moulds to replicate these things a number of times. You imagine the person who’s made it has made hundreds of these things, and they’re incredibly confident when they’re making it.
Archaeological excavations of Moche burials often uncover large numbers of these decorated pots – sometimes many dozens of them – all carefully ordered and organized around repeated themes and subjects. The sheer quantity of Moche pots that survive tells us that Moche society must have operated on a considerable scale. Making pots like this must have been an industry with elaborate structures of training, mass-production and distribution.
Moche territory stretched for about 350 miles along the Pacific coast of what is now Peru. Theirs was, literally, a narrow existence – bounded by the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other, usually with only desert in between. But their largest settlement, where now we find the southern outskirts of the modern Peruvian city of Trujillo, was the first real city in South America, with streets, canals, plazas and industrial areas that any contemporary Roman town would have been proud of. The remains of the canal network, which they used to channel the rivers flowing from the mountains, are still visible today. They also exploited the extremely rich waters of the Pacific for fish, shellfish, seals, whales and birds – there is one pot in the British Museum that shows a Moche fisherman in a large boat catching tuna. Carefully managing and irrigating their environment, the Moche grew maize and beans, farmed llamas, ducks and guinea pigs, and as a result they were able to sustain a population three times as large as the area does today.
And yet, as is usually the case in human history, it is not the great acts of water engineering or agriculture that a society honours in its works of art. It is war. The celebration of war and warriors is a central aspect of Moche art, and this reflects the importance of the warrior to their society – just like the Romans or the Anglo-Saxons in Europe. For the Moche, though, war and religion were joined together in a way that would perhaps be less familiar to Europeans. Fighting for the Moche had a very strong ritual aspect to it. For protection this warrior carries a small round shield, not much bigger than a dinner plate, and for attack a heavy wooden club that could crack a skull with ease. His decorated clothes suggest he is a young man of high status, but he is clearly a foot soldier. There were no horses at this time in South America – those came later with the Europeans. So even the elite amongst the Moche travelled and fought on foot.
Moche pots – sea-lion, priests, warrior, bat and pair of owls
Other pots show scenes of warriors fighting each other in single combat, armed, like this figure, with clubs and small shields. These may well be scenes of real fighting, but they also appear to be part of a common Moche myth that we can piece together from groups of pots. These pots seem to have been made entirely for burials and sacrifice and to be about life and death at its most solemn. Taken as a whole, they tell a gruesome story. To lose a contest like this meant much more than just losing face. The defeated warrior would be sacrificed – decapitated by an animal-headed figure and his blood then drunk by others. This bloody narrative told by the Moche pots is by no means just an artistic invention. Dr Steven Bourget, a leading archaeologist, has found evidence that it really happened:
We excavated a sacrificial site which included about seventy-five male warriors sacrificed during various rituals, and we also found the tombs of two sacrificers. One of the tombs also included a wooden club covered with human blood, so we had the ‘smoking gun’ and the victims themselves side by side within the temple.
We found that these were male warriors – robust, strong males aged between 18 and more or less 39. They had a lot of ancient injuries consistent with battles, but also a lot of fresh injuries – a lot of cut marks on the throats, on the arms, on the faces, indicating that most of them have had their throats cut and a few of them had the skin of their face removed, or arms separated from their bodies. Some of them were defleshed completely and transformed into skeletons – even in one case two human heads were transformed into some kind of container.
There’s a lot of mystery still to unravel about this grim but gripping material. The Moche stopped making these horror-movie pots and indeed pretty much everything else in the seventh century – roughly at about the time of the Sutton Hoo ship burial (seeChapter 47). There are no written records to tell us why, but the best bet seems to be climate change. There were several decades of intense rain followed by a drought that upset the delicate ecology of their agriculture and wrecked much of the infrastructure and farmlands of the Moche state. People did not entirely abandon the area, but their skills seem to have been used above all for the building of fortresses, which suggests a world splintering in a desperate competition for diminishing natural resources. Whatever the cause, in the decades around AD 600, the Moche state and civilization collapsed.
To most of us in Europe today, the Moche and other South American cultures are unfamiliar and unnerving. In part, that’s because they belong to a cultural tradition that followed a very different pattern from Africa, Asia and Europe; for thousands of years, the Americas had a separate parallel history of their own. But, as excavation unearths more of their story, we can see that they are caught in exactly the same predicaments as everybody else – harnessing nature and resources, avoiding famine, placating the gods, waging war – and, as everywhere else, they addressed these problems by trying to construct coherent and enduring states. In the Americas, as all over the world, these ignored histories are now being recovered to shape modern identities, as Steve Bourget details:
One of the fascinating things that I am looking at when I look at Peru today is that they are in the process of doing what also happens in Mexico, perhaps in Egypt, and eventually I would believe China, where these countries who have a great ancient past build their identity through this past and it becomes part of their present. So the past of Peru will be its future. And eventually the Moche will I think become a name just as much as the Maya or the Inca, or the Aztec for that matter. Eventually it will become part of the world legacy.
The more we look at these American civilizations the more we can see that their story is part of a coherent and strikingly similar worldwide pattern; a story that seems destined to acquire an ever greater modern political significance. And next we’re going to see what events of 1,300 years ago meant in contemporary Korea.