{"id":850,"date":"2010-01-22T13:42:11","date_gmt":"2010-01-22T12:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=850"},"modified":"2010-08-21T17:07:47","modified_gmt":"2010-08-21T16:07:47","slug":"the-masks-of-the-moche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=850","title":{"rendered":"The Masks of the Moche"},"content":{"rendered":"

Only a few weeks after hearing about the exciting excavations in Mexico, another archaeologist\u00a0 has been in town to talk about equally exciting work that has been happening in Peru.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Steve Bourget is a leading expert on the Moche, the ancient Peruvian civilisation who perhaps left the most splendid artefacts behind<\/strong>\u00a0 – fabulous masks of turquoise and gilded copper, and ceramics of extraordinary variety, depicting pre-Columbian life in all its forms including, most famously, the erotic:\u00a0 many of their pots are still kept in drawers marked for-the-over -18 only.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"He was describing his recent work at a site called Huaca el Pueblo, where they uncovered a tomb dating from around 300 to 500 AD.\u00a0 Inside were the remains of four individuals, two men and two women, all in their twenties at the time of death.\u00a0 Working at frantic speed over the space of five weeks to beat the threat from both the humidity and local looters, his team of archaeologists injected alcohol under the mask of \u2018the highest status individual’ – who Bourget has called \u2018the Lord of Ucupe\u2019 – to loosen it up for removal from his face in the normal way.\u00a0 They then used thin slivers of bamboo to lift it, only to discover another mask underneath, like a Russian doll.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And what masks!\u00a0 Made from large sheets of gilded copper and fashioned with elaborate Moche iconography:\u00a0 octopus tentacles, owl-heads and, around one woman\u2019s headdress, a ring of minute dancers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Moche seem to be obsessed with certain animal imagery and covered whole tiers of their pyramids with repetitive freezes of octopuses or catfish designs.\u00a0 Bourget was particularly interesting when he talked about the reasons for this.\u00a0 He suggested that certain animals were associated with the El Ni\u00f1o phenomenon that was so critical to the Moche, and often caused major climatic disruption, then as now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Every six or seven years , a change in Pacific wind-directions causes a build up of much warmer water along Peru\u2019s coast:\u00a0 initially it is the fishing which suffers;\u00a0 then the whole climate gets thrown into reverse, with flooding in the deserts and drought in the mountains.\u00a0 The flooding in the deserts not only causes rivers to burst their banks, but brings a plague of mosquitoes and disease in its wake.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The phenomenon is now called El Ni\u00f1o (the child)\u00a0 because it often occurs around Christmas and the infant Jesus is called El Ni\u00f1o Santo. Some El Ni\u00f1os are far worse than others.\u00a0 The El Ni\u00f1o of 1997-98 created Peru\u2019s second largest lake and caused vicious outbreaks of malaria.\u00a0 Across the Pacific, \u00a0Indonesia and Malaysia were starved of rain and experienced terrible forest fires;\u00a0 the knock on effects were felt as far away as Europe and Madagascar.\u00a0\u00a0 Thousands of people were killed and over 30 billion dollars of damage to property was caused.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At times of El Ni\u00f1o it seems that octopuses multiply and sea lions disappear, while stingrays, sharks and a certain sort of swimming crab arrive on the coast: \u00a0all heavily featured in Moche Art.\u00a0 They covered themselves with images of these animals, perhaps in some way to ward off such catastrophe \u2013 with masks, with elaborate textiles and even, as we know from the discovery of a more conserved body at a place called Cao Viejo, with all-over body tattoos.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hardly surprising that the Moche should have paid such attention to the phenomena attending an El Ni\u00f1o disruption, given the huge impact it had on their culture;\u00a0\u00a0 indeed it is thought that their civilisation ultimately came to an end in around 700 AD because of climatic change, rather than from the aggression of a competing outside force.\u00a0 Their courage and creativity displayed in the face of adverse weather conditions was often admirable \u2013 a courage that we may similarly have to dig deep to find ourselves as our own climate worsens.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Only a few weeks after hearing about the exciting excavations in Mexico, another archaeologist\u00a0 has been in town to talk about equally exciting work that has been happening in Peru.\u00a0 Steve Bourget is a leading expert on the Moche, the ancient Peruvian civilisation who perhaps left the most splendid artefacts behind\u00a0 – fabulous masks of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1,3],"tags":[37,35,36],"class_list":["post-850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-peru","category-uncategorized","category-travel","tag-huaca-el-pueblo","tag-moche","tag-steve-bourget"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=850"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1093,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850\/revisions\/1093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}