Moche culture

The Moche flourished on Peru's northern desert coast from about 100 to 800 CE, during the Regional Development Epoch. Scholars hold they were not one monolithic empire but a family of autonomous polities, southern capitals near modern Trujillo among them, united by a brilliant shared culture. With river-fed canal irrigation they made the desert bloom with maize, beans and peanuts, and raised the vast adobe Huacas of the Sun and Moon, painted with processions of warriors, priests and the Decapitator god. Moche portrait-head vessels, stirrup-spout bottles and fine-line painted scenes of ritual combat, sacrifice and sea life form the most narrative art of ancient America. Shared iconography and monumental adobe architecture bound the autonomous valleys together without a single king. Fine-line painters recorded ritual combat, burials and sea voyages on hundreds of surviving vessels. Around 800, drought, dune incursions and internal strife emptied the great huacas, and the coast reorganised toward the later Chimu world.