Not Everyone Is Laid To Rest

There are many different traits and characteristics of Moche funeral rituals. One would argue that there was a system that both the men and women worked by when burying the dead. For example the dead were usually buried in an extended supine position with their hands by their sides. Often the body was wrapped and carefully placed in a cane coffin or cane tube. People of the Moche society often buried certain goods such as food, ceramics, containers, etc along with the corpse. Although most graves were simple, some graves were more elaborate than others and featured more precious and exotic materials. Another custom of the funerary practices of the Moche was to bury people according to status and their roles throughout their lives.
In most cases the body of the deceased was buried shortly after the death. Recently, many archeologists have been forced to question whether all corpses were buried within a short time of their death. Archeologist John Verano faced this battle when analyzing a grave site at Santuario de Sipan in which he discovered that five of the skeletons had been dead for a period of time before they were finally laid to rest. Out of these five corpses, three of them were adolescent women, who Verano claims had shifted inside of their coffins prior to or during the burial ceremony. Because of this shift, Verano was led to believe that the bodies of these women had already begun to decompose by the time that their final burial ceremony took place. In addition to these three women, there were many other burials at this grave site in Sipan that suggested that there was a delay in the actual burial of the body. Another way in which Verano was able to realize that burial of a corpse had been delayed was by insect pupae and fly eggs. The presence of the pupae said that there was time for the corpse to be contaminated and/or tampered with. Quiet often the sex of the deceased that had a delayed burial was women.
One may be led to ask the question of what were the cause and the reason for the delay of the burial of many of these women. There are an abundance of different possibilities about why most of these delayed burials belonged to women. In addition to reasons such as someone dying far away from home, or during a time in which the weather was just too bad or wet to appropriately bury someone, archeologist have come up with other hypothesis of why women had delayed burials. For example Verano encountered a grave site in which a cotton sash was found around the neck of the corpse indicating that the women was probably strangled and a human sacrifice. Along with the sash around her neck, the woman was buried with no cloth wrapped around her and she was laid in a cramped position. Many of these traits suggest that she was a voluntary or involuntary sacrifice to accompany the male in the tomb with her.
Another way in which human bodies were manipulated in Moche graves was by the reopening of the graves. There are several reasons why graves of both men and women were said to be re-opened. For example some graves were re-opened years later in order to renew offerings. Recently an archeologist uncovered a grave site in which a woman who was buried in Moche III, her grave was re-opened in Moche IV and many of her offerings were renewed. She was also accompanied by the corpse of a man. The fact that it is common to find that a grave has been re-opened speaks to the way that the Moche perceived the dead and after-life. To the Moche, the grave is not just a sight for a decaying corpse, but it is a resting place for an ancestor that should be well groomed and respected.

Moche iconography: approaches to interpretation and depictions of high-status females

Between c. 100 CE and c. 700 CE, the Moche culture arose, thrived, and collapsed on the north coast of modern Peru. During that time, they created spectacularly decorated ceramics and murals endowed with intricate iconography whose significance is still being debated today. Without written language (although see Melka 2010 for a review of the hypothesis that enigmatic pottery decorated with lima beans served as a form of communication), the Moche created a seemingly infinite variety of characters and depictions. The many extant ceramic artifacts and murals seem a great place to begin examining women in Moche culture.

However, a problem has already arisen. How can we make sense of Moche iconography given the diversity of depiction? Christopher Donnan in 1976 proposed a thematic approach, in which recurrent symbolic representations across artifacts (such as identifiable characters and motifs) constitute “themes.” For example, the Nativity Theme in Western art has certain characteristics - the manger, the Magi, the baby Jesus - that identify it as a Nativity theme (quoted in Shimada 1994). The characters and motifs may look slightly different across media and time, but are still intelligible. Using this approach, numerous themes like the Burial Theme (see Donnan and McClelland 1979) become intelligible.

The thematic approach is not without its flaws. There is no strict definition of a theme, too much focus is given to single characteristics, and not all ceramics may depict narrative scenes (Quilter 1997). Jeffery Quilter (1997) offers an extension, the narrative approach, that attempts to reconstruct Moche myths using ceramic depiction as well as ethnohistorical data. For example, depictions of baby Jesus, the manger, and the Magi could be interpreted as the story of an important infant born in humble surroundings whose who is visited by three high-status men.

Now we have two theoretical approaches scholars have used to interpret Moche iconography. What can they tell us about the position of women in Moche culture?

Women appear in numerous Moche depictions. Hocquenghem and Lyon (1980) identify a supernatural woman (at left), characterized by two long, bound locks of hair that terminate in snakes’ heads, who is depicted prominently across four themes: the Presentation Theme, the Revolt of the Objects Theme, the Moon/Boat Theme, and the Burial Theme. See, for instance, this depiction of the Presentation Theme, in which she is labeled C. A narrative approach to the Revolt of the Objects scenes gives similar prominence to the supernatural female. Quilter (1997:128) mentions her several times in his reconstructed narrative: “The Lord of the Ulluchus and the Woman caused the natural order to be reversed” and “none was safe from the revolt of the objects. The captured warriors were dragged before the Woman and the Lord of the Ulluchus… [and] sacrificed.”

Ethnohistorical data supports the hypothesis that women held positions of power in Moche culture. The Burial Theme often depicts a supine female figure being pecked by birds (see upper-left corner). Donnan and McClelland (1979) report that Antonio de la Calancha wrote in 1638 that healers who had lost patients through malpractice were killed, their bodies left for the birds. Thus, the female depicted in the Burial Theme may be a high-status healer (Donnan and McClelland 1979). Unfortunately, those eaten by birds in the first millennium are unlikely to be represented in the archaeological record.

If women did hold high-status positions in Moche culture, as the iconography seems to indicate, we would expect funerary remains to do the same. In fact, burials of high-status Moche women have been excavated. At San José de Moro, multiple high-status female burials were excavated in the early 1990s. Grave goods indicated not only that the women in two tombs were priestesses, but that they could be identified with the supernatural woman depicted in the Presentation Theme (Bourget 2006:13). The grave goods found in the first tomb give some indication of the priestess’ status: copper feathers in a ceremonial headdress, a copper goblet similar to that used in depictions of the sacrifice ceremony, jewelry, and a funerary mask (Castillo 2006). These goods indicate that “the elite women of San José de Moro were wealthy and important, and that their importance seems to have stemmed from their own social roles and conditions, not from their association with powerful men“ (Castillo 2006:3).

The strong relation between depictions of women of power in Moche iconography and burials of high-status women point to the same conclusion: that women were could and did hold positions of power and prestige in Moche culture.

References:

Bourget, S. 2006. Sex, Death, and Sacrifice in Moche Religion and Visual Culture. University of Texas Press.

Castillo, L. J. 2006 Five Sacred Priestesses from San José de Moro: Elite Women Funerary Rituals on Peru’s North Coast. In Revista electrónica de arqueología PUCP.

Donnan, C. B. and D. McClelland. 1979. The Burial Theme in Moche iconography. In Studies in Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology 21:5-46.

Hocquenghem, A. M. and P. J. Lyon. 1980. A class of anthropomorphic supernatural females in Moche iconography. In Ñawpa Pacha 18:27-47.

Melka, T. S. 2010. The Moche lima beans recording system, revisited. In Electronic Journal of Folklore 45:89-136.

Quilter, J. 1997. The narrative approach to Moche iconography. In Latin American Antiquity 8:112-113.

Shimada, I. 1994. Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture. University of Texas Press.