1,000-Year-Old Textiles Reveal How Moche Culture Survived in the Andes

A team of archaeologists from Peru, the United States, and Canada recently completed an analysis of 1,000-year-old textile samples recovered during excavations at the ancient and long-abandoned Andean city of Huacas de Moche northern Peru. Despite significant social, cultural, and political changes that had occurred in the region during the mid-to-late first millennium, it seems that some of the local Moche people’s cultural traditions had survived the passage of the centuries, as exhibited by the preservation of traditional ways of weaving and designing textiles.

“While occupants of the site experienced many outside cultural influences, including those from the highland Wari Empire, continuity in textile traditions suggests that some sense of Moche identity was maintained through the tenth century and after the perceived end of the Moche culture,” the study authors wrote in an article about their research published by Antiquity.

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Huaca del Sol Moche building, Trujillo, Peru. (Jeffrey Quilter/ Antiquity Publications Ltd)

Unravelling Moche Through Their Textiles

Next to the one created by the Inca, the enigmatic Moche culture is perhaps the best known and most studied of all the ancient Andean cultures. It is famed for its sprawling temple complexes, most especially the adobe brick pyramidal structure known as Huaca del Sol. Constructed from more than 130 million bricks that were laid down in successive layers in the third through the fifth centuries AD, Huaca del Sol is the largest pre-Columbian structure of its type found anywhere in the Americas.

Sometime in the late first millennium, the Wari culture essentially replaced the Moche as the dominant force in the Central Andes. The Moche were subjugated both culturally and militarily by the Wari people, who came originally from the southern highlands, and this led to the decline and ultimately the demise of their civilization. Historians have concluded that the Moche had virtually disappeared as a separate and distinct culture by the middle of the ninth century, although this contention is disputed by some.

But whatever the fate of their culture, the Moche people did not die out completely after being absorbed into the Wari Empire. And it seems they maintained at least some degree of cultural memory, as the newly published study of their post-Wari textile-making practices makes clear.

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Woven textile fragment made using Moche techniques, but decorated with distinctive Wari imagery. (Lizbeth Pariona Muñoz/Antiquity Publications Ltd)

Exploring Ancient Cultural and Ethnic Identities Using the Archaeological Record

The Moche culture is generally believed to have existed as a distinct entity from the second through the mid-ninth centuries AD. However, not much is known about the specifics of its beginning and its end.

“The people who built Huacas de Moche, now known as the Moche (a.k.a. the Mochicas), are only known to us through archaeology as they had no writing system,” explained anthropologist and study lead author Dr. Jeffrey Quilter from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. “The date range for when the Moche culture existed has been debated for many decades.”

Rather than entering that debate, Dr. Quilter and his colleagues were more interested in gaining insight into a related issue.

“Our research involved our wrestling with the thorny and complicated issue of how ancient people identified themselves,” Dr. Quilter continued. “In brief, when did the Moche stop being Moche at the site of Huacas de Moche?”

To learn more about the persistence of the people’s sense of identity, the researchers set out to perform a more in-depth study of its cultural artifacts, with a special focus on textiles.

In addition to its temple complexes the ancient city of Huacas del Moche featured multiple public plazas and residential districts, making it clear the city was occupied by a relatively large number of people at its population peak. This has made it possible for archaeologists to recover a wide variety of artifacts from the site, including the preserved pieces of textile that have stood the test of time.

Textiles incorporating Moche and Wari images: left; crab man; Right; snake belt man. (Quilter, J et al./ Antiquity Publications Ltd)

In total the researchers examined approximately 20 textile samples recovered during Huacas de Moche excavations. They used radiocarbon dating to find out when the textiles were made, and discovered that many had weaved after the beginning of the 10th century AD. This was many decades beyond the point when the Moche had supposedly been fully assimilated into Wari culture.

Dr. Quilter and his team analyzed the textiles’ production techniques and decoration styles, and were able to identify a continuity between older Moche textile samples and those that dated to the 900-1000 AD range. Interestingly, the textiles did incorporate design features associated with the Wari culture, and with some other cultures in the region as well. But their identification as Moche artifacts was still indisputable.

What all of this shows is that Moche assimilation into the Wari Empire was far from complete.

“Our research indicates that longstanding Moche material cultural practices and styles continued to be valued at Huacas de Moche, long after the presumed end of the archaeological culture,” said study co-author Dr. Carlos Rengifo, an archaeologist from the National University of Trujillo in Peru. “Even as the world about them changed, some sense of Moche identity appears to have been maintained.”

What Archaeology Can Reveal, and What it Can’t

While the new research is revealing, there are limitations to what can be concluded about cultural identity without the presence of written evidence, as the study authors acknowledge.

“Until recently, it is likely that no one referred themselves as Moche,” Dr. Quilter noted. “Nevertheless, the archaeological culture that we call Moche clearly represents a distinct socio-cultural phenomenon and identity for those people who participated in it. Just as determining the cultural identity of any prehistoric community is fraught with difficulties, so too is identifying how they came to take on a new one.”

Top image: Some of the 20 textiles found at Huaca del Sol used in this study.  Source: Antiquity Publications Ltd

By Nathan Falde