Golden Wonder

By EMILY MITCHELL

ENTOMBED WITH GOLD AND silver symbols of spiritual and temporal power, the Moche rulers of ancient Peru took their treasures, and their secrets, to the grave. Archaeologists studying extant murals, metalworks and ceramics could sketch an inexact portrait of the pre-Incan civilization that vanished around A.D. 800, but they were frustrated by the many remaining blank spaces. The absence of a written language meant there was no sure guide to lead them back to the lost culture.

Plunderers seeking gold were the first to find the shining key that would unlock a door to the past. In 1987 a local looter stumbled upon a royal tomb deep inside an adobe-brick pyramid near the village of Sipan in the Lambayeque River valley of Peru's northern coastal plain. The find was pillaged, and many artifacts from it soon began showing up on the international market for stolen art. Fortunately, three other tombs that have since been discovered in the pyramid were protected and excavated under the eye of an expert. As a result, a team of workers was able painstakingly to retrieve splendors from the darkness of a thousand years.

This week artifacts from the tombs go on display in New York City's American Museum of Natural History, along with a full-size reproduction of the burial site of a ruler called the Warrior Priest, or the Lord of Sipan. The wealth of information gained from the tombs' contents outshines the dazzling finds. Says archaeologist Walter Alva, director of the Museo Nacional Bruning de Lambayeque, who has overseen the excavation since the first days: "Sipan's importance for science transcends the glitter of the gold."

The exhibit, notes Museum of Natural History curator Craig Morris, combines art with science to highlight the objects' aesthetic appeal and at the same time emphasize modern archaeological techniques. "Each piece must be understood in relationship to everything else," he explains. Alva and his team made sure that the position of the items in each grave was recorded and analyzed. An ornament in closest proximity to the body, for example, had the greatest symbolic significance and conveyed the role of the person in the highly organized Moche society.

The frenzy that followed the original looting of the tombs seven years ago seemed like footage from an Indiana Jones movie. International collectors and dealers in antiquities joined huaqueros, the Peruvian term for grave robbers, in a rush for Sipan gold. During raids, police were able to confiscate some stolen material, and one huaquero was killed. Then, with the digging site secured and under guard, Alva and a team of archaeologists and workers located tombs that had been sealed off since their occupants were buried. He began what would stretch into years of patiently peeling away layers of debris and removing the delicate objects of metal, shell and stone that gradually unraveled the mysteries surrounding the lost culture. Pre-Columbian expert Christopher Donnan, of the University of California, Los Angeles, joined the project: photographs of tomb objects were made and sent for comparative analysis to UCLA's Fowler Museum, which has more than 135,000 pictures of Moche artifacts in its archives.

No one had previously imagined that the Moche had amassed such riches or produced so powerful a ruling elite. Donnan compares interpreting the Moche with no information about Sipan's Senor to "trying to reconstruct ancient Egypt without knowing anything of the existence of the pharaohs." Our understanding of Moche social organization, religion, art and technology is now divided, says Alva, into periods he calls "before Sipan and after Sipan."

Moche pottery often depicted scenes of naked captives being sacrificed by having their throat cut. An imposing figure with an enormous crescent-shaped ornament on his conical helmet and large discs in his ears is ever present. From a goblet he drinks the blood of murdered prisoners. Scholars had speculated that these were mythical representations, but imposing regalia and ornaments placed around the 1,700-year-old corpse of the Sipan Lord and found in one of the other tombs gave the ceremonial slayings a grisly new meaning. From his attire, he was recognized as the Warrior Priest and the principal figure in representations of a rite of human sacrifice that held great significance for the Moche. Adorned in gold and with glistening bells, beads and ornaments that shivered at the slightest movement, he must have impressed his subjects as more blindingly radiant than the sun overhead.

Duplicates of animals on Moche pottery and murals, anthropomorphized spiders, crabs and owls appeared on tomb artifacts. They embody real people whose ceremonial roles have those creatures' characteristics. In Moche drawings, for instance, a strikingly arachnoid figure, dubbed the Decapitator by archaeologists, clasps a crescent-bladed knife in one hand and a severed head in the other. The supreme example of Moche craftsmanship was found atop the royal corpse in Tomb 3, oldest of the chambers: on each of 10 gold beads is a spider with a human face etched on its back. "The Moche communicated very effectively through their artistic depictions in the absence of a writing system," observes Donnan. "We need to become more sophisticated in our ability to work with that kind of symbolism."

At the high point of the seven centuries of Moche civilization, Alva estimates, 5,000 people lived in the sandy foothills near Sipan. There too were the busy workshops of the masterly skilled artisans who created the richest treasures found in the Western hemisphere. They perfected an alloying technique, using gold, silver and copper and formulated a method of gilding copper by electrochemical plating.

Alva believes that he is close to finding a fourth burial site and that the next 10 years will see even greater revelations. Archaeologists are finding clues about the life of ordinary people by uncovering foundations of houses, determining their size and the location of doors and hearths. In 1995, after completing a tour of five American museums, the contents of the royal tombs will go on permanent display in the Bruning museum, where a specially constructed $800,000 wing will be financed partly by proceeds from the U.S. tour. It is not inconceivable that Sipan will someday rival Machu Picchu as a destination for scholars and tourists. From the shadows of the past, Sipan's Lord will have returned in glory to cast a golden glow over his country.

With reporting by Adriana von Hagen/Lima