Moche (Other Keyword)
26-33 (33 Records)
This paper examines the relationships between food, identity, and social inequality on the Prehispanic Peruvian North Coast through a paleoethnobotanical perspective. We reconstruct household culinary practices to address the roles that food played in the migrant experience of highlanders that settled in a traditionally coastal river valley. This migration occurs just prior to the consolidation of the Southern Moche polity, one of the earliest state polities in the Americas and characterized by...
Religious and Political Resilience in the Ancient Moche World: Monumentality, Micro-chronology, and Environment in Úcupe, Lambayeque, Peru (200-900 CE). The Úcupe Cultural Landscape Archaeological Project. First Results of the 2022 Field Season (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will present the results of the first excavation campaign of our project (UCLAP) at the Úcupe Archaeological Complex, Zaña Valley, northern Peru. Composed of a dozen of huaca-mounds, Úcupe is an Early Moche (200-400 CE) site that extends over a plateau of 10 ha, located on the southern bank of the Zaña Valley. The site became particularly...
Scaling the Huaca: Constructing Late Moche Identity through Architectonic Re-presentation of Place at Huaca Colorada, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru (2015)
Following Descola’s "modes of identification", Andean ontology has recently been suggested to represent a combination of animism and analogism that establishes strong intersubjective relationships wherein humans, objects and places are intrinsically linked while simultaneously creating a highly hierarchical scale based on the properties of each autonomous entity. In order to operationalize this animistic-analogical ontology, mimetic processes of imitation and transformation serve to link and...
Seeing Gender Ambiguity in Moche Visual Culture (2018)
This paper explores the visual language of gender expression in Moche art, seeking to determine the relationships among ambiguous gender, social role, and status in Moche visual culture. The Moche are well-known for their representations of warriors and warfare, as well as the sacrificial rituals associated with the taking of prisoners. However, this martial focus was not consistent across Moche time and space, and regional variations indicate the existence of a potential field of expression...
Southern Moche Politics Reevaluated: The Reconciliation of Relative (ceramic chronologies) and Absolute (radiocarbon) Dates. (2015)
Recently I performed a reevaluation of published radiocarbon dates for the Moche culture (200-900 AD). I only considered 14C samples obtained from short-lived plant materials found in association with "datable" ceramics (Moche I-V, and Early, Middle, and Late Moche). The purpose was to test the validity of the relative ceramic chronologies in each valley against absolute dates. For this paper, using Bayesian analysis I compare the well contextualized Moche dates from the Chicama Valley to...
A Study of Fineline Iconographic Depictions at the Late Moche site of Huaca Colorada, in the Jequetepeque Valley, Peru (2015)
The Late Moche Period (AD 500-800) of the North Coast of Peru is marked by significant alterations to the iconography of elite fineline ceramics. In particular, the earlier imagery, depicting conventionalized narratives of ritual performances and exploits of male Moche divinites or their mortal avatars disappears in certain locales. In southern valleys, at sites such as Galindo, Late Moche elite ceramics largely depicted abstract geometrical imagery including the widespread step-and-mountain...
Study of the construction sequence of a Moche ceremonial mound in northern Peru: Huaca La Capilla - San José de Moro (2016)
For two decades, archaeological research in the Moche site of San José de Moro, located in the valley of Jequetepeque northern coast of Peru, have focused on exploring the ceremonial nature of the site from the study of funerary and feasts contexts. However, there are still many unresolved questions about the ritual practices, where they were made and what its frequency was. That is why, since 2012, new explorations started at a monumental construction, in order to understand the role and...
Variations in Mochica Metalwork (2017)
In the last thirty years, archaeological investigations on the north coast of Peru have produced a wealth of new information leading to nuances in our understanding of Moche sociopolitical organization (AD 200-800). These discoveries have included excavations of intact tombs of Moche male and female elites, interred with their ritual regalia and other grave goods. Metal ornaments made up an important part of this regalia, yet our understanding of Moche metallurgy technology and its relationship...