The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (60 page)

While Zapotec rulers were extremely powerful, some of this power was shared with a governmental council. This council, presumably composed of nobles, met in a special building called a
yohohuexija,
which ought to be archaeologically identifiable.

PERU’S MOCHE STATE

When we last looked at Peru, we were struck by how precocious its rank societies were. They were also militaristic, and armed conflict remained a factor in the rise of Peru’s largest first-generation kingdom. That conflict took two forms: neighboring coastal chiefs fought with each other, and highland chiefs sought to take over the irrigation systems of coastal valleys.

Some 2,500 years ago, rank societies operated in all the major river valleys of the northern and central Peruvian coast. Many important chiefly centers lay upstream in what is called “the middle valley,” the point where rivers emerge from the canyons of the Andes.

The middle valley was narrower than the lower valley, requiring less labor and expertise to irrigate. There were places where water could easily be diverted from the river and brought downhill to potato and manioc fields. Still farther upstream, at elevations of 2,000 to 4,000 feet, conditions were often satisfactory for the irrigation of two crops: cotton for textiles and coca leaves for ritual.

Archaeologists have subjected many of Peru’s coastal valleys to full-coverage surveys, making possible a tentative reconstruction of what happened next. In no case, however, do we have the step-by-step chronology of events that we would like to have.

Roughly 2,400 years ago, according to archaeologist Brian Billman, a wave of violence swept the coast as highland societies began to raid coastal valleys. It would appear that the highland chiefs controlled enough warriors to take over some of the cotton and coca lands just mentioned.

Coastal chiefs were occasionally able to unite a number of rank societies under a single leader in response to this threat from aggressive highland societies. Surveys by David Wilson provide evidence that a large society, with a political hierarchy of four administrative levels, formed in the Casma Valley between 2,200 and 2,000 years ago. This society eventually broke down, however, suggesting that its enemies were too strong to expel.

Between 2,000 and 1,800 years ago, according to Billman, highland invaders had penetrated the middle portions of the Moche, Virú, Nepeña, Casma, Chillón, and Lurín Valleys. These invaders caused the abandonment of a number of coastal population centers. One of those centers was Cerro Arena in the Moche Valley, a settlement on a defensible mountain ridge. At its peak, according to archaeologist Curtiss Brennan, Cerro Arena had 2,000 visible structures crammed into three-quarters of a square mile.

With the abandonment of centers such as Cerro Arena, the indigenous population of the Moche Valley moved closer to the ocean and consolidated into a single, highly nucleated community called Cerro Oreja. Apparently now united under one leader, this coastal society became one of the first to fight back successfully against highland invaders.

After driving out their highland enemies and reclaiming their upstream irrigation lands, the leaders of Cerro Oreja moved their capital to a new locality, known to archaeologists as Las Huacas de Moche. There they established a 250-acre urban center that served as the capstone of a four-level political hierarchy. Below it were five towns in the 35- to 125-acre size range; a half dozen large villages in the 12- to 35-acre range; and scores of smaller villages and hamlets.

The creation of Peru’s Moche kingdom seems to have been a centuries-long process, involving both highland invaders and neighboring coastal societies. Archaeologists working on Peru’s north coast are still not in agreement about whether Cerro Arena (200
B.C.–A.D.
1), Cerro Oreja (
A.D.
1–200), or Las Huacas de Moche (
A.D.
200–400) was the capital of the valley’s first kingdom. We see this situation as analogous to the one described for the Oaxaca Valley. Archaeologists working there sometimes disagree about whether the first Zapotec kingdom emerged when Monte Albán was founded (500
B.C.
), when it began to attack its rivals (300
B.C.
), or when it finally defeated Tilcajete (30
B.C.
). Similar questions have been asked about the sequence of Hawai’ian rulers comprising ‘Umi, Alapai, Kalaniopu’u, and Kamehameha. What seems to happen in such sequences is that each ruler pushes the system closer to monarchy until the evidence becomes incontrovertible.

The analogies between the Moche and Zapotec did not end there. The leaders of Las Huacas de Moche, like those of Monte Albán, were not content with local victories. They now had the most effective military apparatus on the coast. Instead of continuing to pursue their highland enemies, they began to use that apparatus against their coastal neighbors. Between
A.D.
200 and 600, the Moche state expanded until it came to dominate 15 coastal valleys. The result was a narrow strip of empire stretching 360 miles, from Piura in the north to Huarmey in the south. The Moche succeeded in part because they knew it would be easier to subdue other coastal valleys than to confront belligerent highland armies on the latter’s home turf.

The Southern Moche

Between the Jequetepeque and Chicama Rivers lies an expanse of desert called the Pampa de Paiján. This waterless barrier divided the Moche empire into northern and southern halves. The Moche Valley itself was the heartland of the southern half. Its capital, Las Huacas de Moche, featured two immense pyramids separated by densely occupied residential areas. One of the most extraordinary features of the Moche empire was its lavish use of labor. Billman estimates that in the Moche Valley alone, labor gangs dug more than two million cubic feet of new irrigation canals and built more than 44 million cubic feet of monumental public architecture.

The
huacas,
or sacred pyramids, of the Moche capital represented a huge undertaking. Archaeologist Michael Moseley estimates that the smaller of the two huacas was originally 312 feet long, 279 feet wide, and 66 feet high, requiring more than 50 million adobe bricks. It was wholly artificial, its builders eschewing the earlier practice of dressing up natural hills to resemble pyramids.

The larger of the two Moche pyramids was the biggest adobe structure ever built in the New World. Before its partial destruction by the Spaniards it was 1,122 feet long, 522 feet wide, and 131 feet high, requiring more than 143 million adobe bricks. Each of the dozens of work gangs assigned to the pyramid impressed the upper surfaces of their bricks with a distinctive “maker’s mark,” presumably to prove that their quota of bricks had been met.

The Northern Moche

To the north of the Pampa de Paiján, another five or six valleys made up the northern Moche region. Each of these valleys supported a district capital, and because later rulers occasionally moved their capitals, some valleys display the ruins of several large administrative centers.

Any question about which type of state the Moche created has been answered by the archaeological site of Sipán in the Lambayeque Valley. There the excavation of a series of spectacular tombs by Walter Alva and Christopher Donnan reveals that the Moche state was not only a monarchy but an individualizing monarchy, in Colin Renfrew’s terms.

The royal tombs of Sipán were hidden deep within a platform of adobe bricks. Their principal occupants may represent three generations of Moche rulers. The graves include spectacular sumptuary goods, sacrificed animals, prisoners, and individuals who might be servants and/or relatives of lower rank.

Tomb 3 was the earliest. Its central figure was a male ruler wrapped inside several layers of cloth and a woven mat. He was accompanied by objects of gold, silver, and copper, including two scepters and the standing figure of a warrior. One of his necklaces consisted of ten large gold beads, each depicting a spider with a human head caught in its web. Another set of beads portrayed owls’ heads, and there was a half-human, half-crab figure in gilded copper. The symbolism of the king as warrior was unmistakable.

The principal occupant of Tomb 2 was a 35- to 45-year-old man; his body lay in a plank coffin rather than the mat used in the earlier tomb (
Figure 53
). Wearing nose and ear ornaments of gold, silver, and turquoise, the Tomb 2 ruler was accompanied by hundreds of copper discs, thousands of shell beads, copper bells, copper slippers, necklaces of miniature copper trophy heads, and a headdress with a gilded copper owl.

To the far left of the ruler was a teenage boy in a cane coffin, accompanied by two large copper discs. A smaller cane coffin that contained a child eight to ten years of age lay at the ruler’s feet; sharing the coffin were a dog and a snake. To the ruler’s immediate left lay a woman 19 to 25 years of age, wearing a copper headdress and a textile to which discs of gilded copper had been sewn.

FIGURE 53.
   Tomb 2 of Sipán, Peru, contained a Moche ruler in his plank coffin, accompanied by numerous sacrificed people and animals.

A number of humans and animals had been sacrificed to accompany the ruler. To his right lay a woman 18 to 22 years of age, perhaps a servant or slave, sprawled facedown. Near her feet was a decapitated llama. Buried above the roof of the tomb was another cane coffin, this one bearing a man whose feet had been cut off at the ankles. He was accompanied by a copper crown and a feather headdress with a large copper shaft, indicating that he might have been a mutilated captive of relatively high rank.

Tomb 1 was the final one in the sequence. The burial chamber had adobe benches along its walls. The ruler’s plank coffin was securely fastened with copper straps so that it could be lowered into the tomb with ropes, a ceremony sometimes depicted on painted Moche vessels. Two sacrificed llamas lay on the tomb floor to either side of the coffin.

The ruler in the plank coffin was so covered with gold, silver, copper, and turquoise that it took the excavators a long time to reach his actual corpse. He wore a copper-plate headdress, and his necklaces were of gold and silver beads, designed to look like unshelled peanuts. His scepter was also of gold and silver. Piled on his chest were scores of miniature crabs and trophy heads made from precious metals.

Half a dozen other people accompanied this ruler in death. Directly atop one of the sacrificed llamas was the cane coffin of a powerfully built man, possibly a warrior. His coffin included a large war club, a circular shield, and a crescent-shaped head ornament. Atop the other sacrificed llama was the cane coffin of a 35–45-year-old man accompanied by a dog. This man wore a beaded chest covering and had several copper offerings.

Three other cane coffins held women between 15 and 20 years of age. Their skeletons were partially disarticulated, suggesting that the women had died earlier and were exhumed in order to be reburied with the ruler.

Inequality and Administrative Hierarchy in the Moche Empire

It seems likely that the Moche expanded until they had incorporated a number of formerly autonomous kingdoms, occupied by different ethnic groups and speaking non-Moche languages. Such a takeover of other kingdoms is one criterion of an empire.

Just as we saw in the Oaxaca region, some smaller kingdoms probably allied themselves with the Moche peacefully, while others had to be conquered. As a result, the capitals of some provinces retained their own distinctive architecture and pottery style, while others appear to be brand-new administrative centers imposed by the Moche.

All empires have an expiration date, and the Moche began to lose power to a series of second-generation states after
A.D.
600. The Moche had no writing system, and they disappeared long before the arrival of European eyewitnesses. All we know about them is what we can infer from their archaeological remains.

One source of information consists of detailed scenes of Moche activities, executed in fine-line painting on luxury pottery (
Figure 54
). In some scenes we see the Moche ruler carried on his litter or seated prominently at the top of a ramp or stairway. We see warriors seizing captives by the hair, crushing their skulls with war clubs, or dismembering them. We see male priests slitting captives’ throats and female priests catching the blood in copper goblets. We know that some of these scenes have real-world validity, because Christopher Donnan and Luis Jaime Castillo found two of the priestly women, dressed in full regalia and accompanied by their copper goblets, buried at San José de Moro in the Jequetepeque Valley.