Chan Chan's working woman is praised by the UNESCO

The person in charge to take care of the archaeological ruins of Chan Chan, Maria Mendoza, was considered a heroine by the UNESCO, given its ongoing efforts to protect this monument heritage.

Maria Mercedes and other 80 women works at Chan Chan, monitoring the damages left by the passage of time and the weather at the monument. Each one loads in a wheelbarrow, buckets of mud on a detailed work that is repeated every day.

With an inexhaustible patience, Maria Mercedes divides her time: in the morning she takes care of this architectural complex, and in the evening turns into a great housewife.

She grew up next to her mother, who guided her steps and taught her to love the history and traditions of her homeland, to respect the legacy of the ancient Peruvians. Education that puts in practice until today.

The German journalists Ruth Wolter and Astrid Piethan travelled from Germany to Chan Chan as part of the project "Heroes of the Heritage" promoted by the UNESCO in Germany, exclusively to interview María.

In the German city of Bonn, the headquarters of the UNESCO, an exhibition will be held soon with all the protagonists worldwide, and Maria Mercedes is the only representative of all Latin America.

Learn more of the north of Peru and its architectural riches, on the following link: Moche Culture.

Peru: Entrepreneurs to boost Lambayeque tourism

Entrepreneurs of the Chamber of Commerce and Production of the Lambayeque region, through its institutional guild, will promote the new touristic routes of the Lambayeque region. 

The move intends to increase the amount of visitors, it was informed.

According to Nino Onofre, representative of the Tourism guild attached to the Chamber of Commerce, a “contribution of the private sector” will seek to position Lambayeque as one of the most important tourism destinations in the world.

Among its attractions are: The Santuario Bosque de Poma, Chotuna and the Pimentel Beaches.

Travel to Moche Route with this tour: Moche Route Tour 3D/2N : Chiclayo and Trujillo

Source: Andina

More than 300 archaeological pieces have been restored

After an arduous work in the Royal Tombs of Sipan Museum, was able to restore and to rescue more than 300 archaeological pieces. It was announced by the director of this cultural precinct, Walter Alva, who said that the objects belong to Mochica and Lambayeque cultures.

The renowned archaeologist referred that among the restored and rescued objects are 35 pieces of metal like batons, crowns, shields, copper rings, gilded copper and silver, plus 48 pieces of ceramics, 5 textiles and 253 fragments of polychrome murals of more than 1,800 years of antique, from the works of researches made in Huaca Rajada Sipán, Huaca the town of Úcupe and Pucalá's Huaca Santa Rosa.

Alva indicated that during 2014 national registers managed to get 1,270 of Sipán´s Collection, Huaca Santa Rosa and Huaca the town of Úcupe. "This year it expects to complete the national registers of Sipán's Collection, obtaining three thousand records ", he specified.

"These important objects belong to the Mochica and Lambayeque cultures. Conservation and restoration takes shape thanks to the work performed by 4 professionals from our museum ", expressed Alva, who said that all the pieces will be presented in four samples that will be held throughout the year, in the Royal Tombs of Sipan Museum.

For more information about this culture enter to the follow link:   http://www.inkanatura.com/en/moche-culture

Source: La República

Easter in Moche was declared Cultural Heritage

The Holy Week in Moche's district, Trujillo, has been distinguished as National Cultural Heritage by the Ministry of Culture of Peru, thanks to its importance as a religious celebration and the great faith of the people.

The characteristics that this nomination highlights, are the traditional elements of the local culture, which shape the identity of the population and an important tradition of rituality.

The festivity lasts for 10 days, begins on Holy Friday and ends on Easter Sunday. During these days people practice rituals of concentration and meditation.

Another important aspect of the celebration is to consume the traditional Theologian Soup, a festive soup widely consumed by people of the northern region, which consists of chicken broth and beef with dipped bread, potato, milk and cheese.

Thanks to the Moche population this tradition is still practicing and it renews every year.

Enjoy the Moche route with the following tour:

-MocheRoute Tour 3D/2N : Chiclayo and Trujillo

The New York Times aconseja visitar Perú este año

La revista estadounidense New York Times, ha publicado el informe “52 lugares para visitar en 2015”. En la lista figura la costa norte del Perú, con sus atractivos turísticos, como el balneario de Huanchaco, la ciudad de Trujillo, el puerto de Pimentel, Lambayeque o Punta Sal.  Además recomienda una serie de hoteles para garantizar una maravillosa estadía a los turistas.

"El turismo en el Perú se expande más allá del obligado viaje al Cusco", menciona la revista del influyente diario. Es así que recomienda visitar y conocer los sitios arqueológicos del lugar " la ciudad de adobe de Chan Chan y las pirámides Moche, Sipán y El Brujo".

Lost society tore itself apart

Two thousand years ago, a mysterious and little known civilisation ruled the northern coast of Peru. Its people were called the Moche.

They built huge and bizarre pyramids that still dominate the surrounding landscape; some well over 30m (100ft) tall.

They are so heavily eroded, they look like natural features; only close up can you see they are made up of millions of adobe mud bricks.

These pyramids are known as "huacas", meaning "sacred site" in the local Indian dialect. Several contain rich collections of murals; others house the tombs of Moche leaders.

As archaeologists have excavated these Moche sites, they have unearthed some of the most fabulous pottery and jewellery ever to emerge from the ancient world.

Archaeologist Dr Walter Alva with an elaborate Moche ear ornamentThe Moche were pioneers of metal working techniques such as gilding and early forms of soldering.

It enabled them to create extraordinarily intricate artefacts; ear studs and necklaces, nose rings and helmets, many heavily inlaid with gold and precious stones.

Archaeologists have likened them to the Greek and Roman civilisations in Europe.

But who were these extraordinary people and what happened to them? For decades the fate of the Moche has been one of the greatest archaeological riddles in South America.

Now, at last, scientists are coming up with answers. It is a classic piece of archaeological detective work.

'Mud burials'

This week's Horizon tells the story of the rise and fall of a pre-Inca civilisation that has left an indelible mark on the culture and people of Peru and the central Andes Mountains.

One of the first important insights into this remarkable culture came in the mid-1990s when Canadian archaeologist Dr Steve Bourget, of the University of Texas in Austin, made a series of important discoveries.

Excavating at one of the major Moche huacas - a site known as the Huaca de la Luna - he came across a series of dismembered skeletons that bore all the signs of human sacrifice.

Archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo holds a Moche ceramic depicting warriors engaged in ritual combatHe also found that many of the skeletons were so deeply encased in mud the burials had to have taken place in the rain.

Yet in this part of Peru it almost never rains; it could not have been a coincidence. Bourget speculated that the Moche, like many desert dwelling peoples, had used human sacrifice to celebrate or encourage rain.


The theory appeared to explain puzzling and enigmatic images of human sacrifice found on Moche pottery; it provided a new insight into Moche society; yet it did not explain why this apparently sophisticated civilisation had disappeared.

Then American climatologist Dr Lonnie Thompson, of Ohio State University, came up with a startling new find. Using evidence from ice cores drilled in ancient glaciers in the Andes, he found that at around AD 550 to 600, the coastal area where the Moche lived had been hit by a climatic catastrophe.

Internal collapse

For 30 years the coast had been ravaged by rain storms and floods - what is known as a Mega El Niño - followed by at least 30 years of drought. All the human sacrifices in the world would have been powerless to halt such a disaster.

It seemed a plausible explanation for the demise of a civilisation.
But then in the late 1990s, American archaeologist Dr Tom Dillehay revisited some of the more obscure Moche sites and found that they dated from after AD 650.

Thompson's ice cores have opened up the climate history bookMany were as late as AD 750, 100 years after the climatic double-whammy. He also found that at these later settlements, the huacas had been replaced by fortresses.

The Moche had clearly survived the climatic disaster but had they then been hit by an invasion? Dillehay cast around but could find no evidence for this.
He now put together a new theory, one that, in various guises, is now widely accepted by South American experts.

The Moche had struggled through the climatic disaster but the leadership - which at least in part had claimed authority from its ability to determine the weather - had lost authority and Moche villages and/or clan groups had turned on each other in a battle for scarce resources such as food and land.
Moche society had pulled itself apart.

New Understanding Of Human Sacrifice In Early Peru

Published by Science Daily — A study published in the August/October issue of CurrentAnthropology, reports on new archaeological evidence regarding theidentities of human sacrifice victims of the Moche society of Peru.

The Moche was a complex society whose influence extended over mostof the North coast of Peru between AD 200 and 650. They are widelyknown for their life-like mold-made ceramics, beautiful metallurgy, mudbrick pyramids, and iconographic depictions of one-on-one combatbetween Moche warriors. In recent years archaeologists had uncoveredevidence of the sacrifice of adult males at a number of Moche pyramids.What has remained unclear until now is who these sacrificial victimswere. Largely due to the nature of iconographic depictions of Mochecombat most scholars have speculated that the sacrifices were largelyrituals among local Moche elites, the primary goal of which was toprovide human victims for sacrificial ceremonies.

However, this newly published study by Richard Sutter and Rosa Cortezcompares genetically influenced tooth cusp and root traits for theMoche sacrificial victims from a pyramid at the Moche capital withthose of other North Coast populations. The findings of thisarchaeological comparison indicate that the sacrificial victims werenot local Moche elite. Instead they were likely warriors captured fromnearby valleys. When this result is considered in light of otherarchaeological and skeletal lines of evidence it suggests that theMoche populations in each valley were characterized by territorialconflict and competition with one another.

Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research onhumankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarshipon human cultures and on the human and other primate species.Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in awide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physicalanthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology andprehistory, folklore, and linguistics. For more information, please seeour website: www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA

"The Origins and Role of the Moche (AD 1-750) Human SacrificialVictims: A Bio-Archaeological Perspective." Richard Sutter and RosaCortez. Current Anthropology 46:4.