Neal Bierling, Archaeological Adventures: Getting High in Peru: The Lords of Sipan

Getting High in Peru: On Site at Sipan’s Huaca Rajada

Focus today is on the Moche

I knew from Lonely Planet that The Lord of Sipan Museum did not allow photography so I was pleased to learn that at the archaeological site they have a small museum where I could do photography before visiting the site. They have an excellent museum with reconstructions of the tombs and finds. In addition, they also had reconstructions of the tombs out in the field. This is what you will see my posting of Sipan. The Lord of Sipan is important and I was able to buy the book written by the excavator: Sipan, Discovery and Research by Walter Alva. With the book I was able to match many of my pictures taken out in the field or the on-site museum with the book’s official cleaned up pictures. My pictures are only from the archaeological site and the on-site museum.

The archaeological site, known as Huaca (Temple) Rajada, with its own museum, is east of Chiclayo. The large and official museum (no cameras allowed inside), opened in 2002 and is named the Museo Tumbas Realas de Sipan (Royal Tombs Museum of Sipan), and located northwest of Chiclayo in Lambayeque. “Sipan” in the extinct Moche language is thought to mean either Temple of the Moon or Temple of the Lords. The Huaca here has 3-truncated pyramid-shaped platforms with the west, the largest, sized at 465 x 465 x 116-feet high. The adjacent one is smaller but seven-feet higher, and the third is quite a bit smaller.

The story begins at the mudbrick platform site in 1987 as a salvage excavation before modern looters totally destroyed the Huaca. A similar story happens repeatedly in the Middle East. New artifacts begin showing up in antiquities shops in Jerusalem, for example, and the antiquities dealers show the artifacts to you for verification, but you are thinking, where is the tomb where these came from? Eventually, its location is found and the Antiquities Department sends out a team to conduct a salvage operation.

With the Lords of Sipan, we are going back to the Moche (or Mochica) culture back to the 1^st century AD and AD 700. Along with the later Sican and Chimu, mentioned and pictured in earlier postings, the Moche culture developed along the coast alongside the river waters descending from the Andes flowing to the Pacific. The Moche were the mudbrick pyramid and platform builders, which we noted with the earlier posting of the Huaca de la Luna. They built their mudbrick walls in columns (panels) evidently acknowledging seismic and climate concerns. They then plastered the walls and decorated them with friezes of their gods in reds and yellows.

Huaca de la Luna: Note the 'panels' in the above shot. They would then be plastered followed by designs as below

They were also recognized for their metallurgy skills, outstanding ceramics, developing and utilizing irrigation for their farm products, and textiles using their cotton crop. All of the above beginning around 2000 years ago, around 1400 years before the Inca, who have been receiving most of the press and coverage in textbooks.

The man iguana, god of the dead

A skeletal man with drum used in funerary rites

A gilded copper feline with turquoise eyes and shell teeth

Copper figure with turquoise eyes and owl headdress

Gilded copper plates of a tunic

Strap-handle owl

A live owl on site--a good omen.

A copper headdress topped with an owl.

Although the focus of the recovery is on the Lord of Sipan, two other major tombs were those of the Priest and the Old Lord of Sipan. Additional tombs were also recovered and featured on site and in Alva’s book. It is important to note that the Moche and the other pre-Inca cultures did not have a written language forcing the archaeologists to make suppositions based on what the Moche ceramics and other artifacts seem to suggest.

The Lord of Sipan’s tomb: Eight persons went with him, 3 young women, 1 man on each side, a child, a guardian (buried above the others), llamas, and a dog.

The Lord of Sipan above and below.

The Priest's Tomb now below

The priest was accompanied by 2 women, a man in a cane coffin, a child w/dog and snake, and a decapitated llama.

Closeup of the Priest

Now, the Old Lord of Sipan

The Old Lord of Sipan (above and below): the surface of the funeral bundle with ceramics and 100s of copper artifacts

Other tombs have been recovered. This is tomb #7

A Grave Goods Room with 100s of ceramics

For example, viewing all the grave goods buried with the Moche Lord, Priest, or the Old Lord, and the other individuals, I too believe that it is safe to assume that the Moche (and the pre-Inca cultures posted earlier) believed in an afterlife. I do not believe that there is any better answer than that the Lord’s companions, the animals, the ceramic jars, and the other goods were to provide companionship and sustenance for the Lord in the hereafter. The Lord would agree with me that “Death, not life, is the overture to Eternity.” I jotted down this phrase in the early 1960s when my interest in archaeology began. From looking at the artifacts, including friezes, posted earlier, the pre-Inca believed in a god (or gods). How this belief worked for them, more excavation may provide us with additional information. After working with Middle Eastern archaeology over a 40-year period, I may have become a bit inured to other cultures’ view of the afterlife, but now that I am experiencing it here in Peru for the first time, I am pausing to reflect and to compare.

While I was resizing pictures of vultures at Sipan, I thought about how “eagles” in Hebrew (nesher) as in Isaiah 40: 31 may actually be "vultures." This should not be a problem for us, since even in Egypt, the vulture was a god and a guardian god over the pharaoh. And here at Sipan, I noted that the vultures continue to watch over the Huacas and the Lords of Sipan. Paz to the Lords who may still be interred there.