Disturbing rituals, ‘sex pots’, jewellery: The surprise relics being unearthed in Peru

This story is part of the March 1 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

If, for whatever reason, you wanted to slide into anonymity, to lie low by the sea, swimming and eating ceviche, you could do a lot worse than Huanchaco, a fishing town on the north-west coast of Peru. With its sleepy backroads and dusty cantinas, its cheap hostels and general indifference to time, the town has become popular with backpackers and, in particular, itinerant surfers. Indeed, the town has for some time been at the centre of a minor debate about the origins of wave-riding: some claim that this region’s local fishermen, who have been plying the ocean here for 3500 years, were history’s first surfers, using their reed boats, called caballitos de totora, to catch the waves back to shore.

But Huanchaco has another, equally esoteric, claim to fame. Since 2011, the town and its surrounds have provided some of the richest finds in South American archaeology, a veritable Aladdin’s cave of ancient relics, including ornaments of copper and gold, intricate jewellery and elaborate headdresses. The area has become best known, however, for its mass graves. In 2018, researchers led by Gabriel Prieto, an anthropologist then working at the nearby National University of Trujillo, announced the discovery of the bones of 140 children, aged between five and 14, and 200 llamas. The kids, who were killed in a single event about 550 years ago, had their chests cut open and their hearts pulled out. Just months later, another 56 skeletons were discovered not far away. In 2019, the bodies of 227 more children were found nearby, making it the world’s largest such discovery. Then, late last year, another burial ground was unearthed in a vacant lot, with the remains of 76 children.

“We’ve now found more than 600 children [in Huanchaco],” says archaeologist Julio Asencio, who I met one morning last December at the University of Trujillo, half an hour’s drive south of Huanchaco. “We were not expecting that many.”

Local archaeologist Julio Asencio with one of the skulls.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Asencio, who is 27, studied under Prieto, who is now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida. He is short and slightly built, wears sneakers, T-shirt and a baseball cap, and speaks in a sing-song Spanish so soft I can hardly hear him. His lab is large and light-filled, and not dissimilar to a mail sorting room, its shelves crowded with plastic storage bins and assorted relics – gold jewellery, textiles, ceramics, bundles of bones – mostly from the Chimu civilisation, which existed here between 900AD and 1400AD. So voluminous are the recent Huanchaco finds that there are literally dozens of cardboard boxes full of human remains; so many, in fact, that they spill out the door and into the breezeway, where they are stacked five metres high against the wall outside.

Cooing with excitement and reverence, Asencio shows me several recent finds: a crescent-shaped ceremonial knife called a tumi, and a spectacular penacho, a headdress of macaw feathers, blue and lemon-yellow, made some 750 years ago. “The macaw is a jungle bird,” Asencio explains. “We think it was brought over the mountains, from the Amazon, and raised in Huanchaco.” The unfortunate children, meanwhile, are thought to have been an offering to the gods after heavy rains and flooding, possibly caused by El Niño. It was a desperate measure. “What greater sacrifice can you make than to offer up your kids?” Asencio says. Moreover, the children were better spirit guides. “It’s thought that the kids had more pure souls, so they could more easily find their way to the afterlife.”

I ask whether it would be possible to see one of the children’s remains. “Sí!” says Asencio, walking outside and retrieving a cardboard box, which he places on the floor. He dons blue latex gloves, then carefully unpacks the box, pulling out something dark, the size of a football, wrapped in thick, clear plastic. Gently removing the plastic, he reveals at last a skull, which he holds delicately in his hands, palms up, like an offering.

It’s covered in fine brown dirt and flecks of skin. There’s a patch of hair on the crown of its head. The teeth are perfect. Asencio places the skull on the table before us, and a handful of grey grit pours from the hole at its base. Brain dust, perhaps, from 700 years ago. “There is so much here,” Asencio says. “Our culture, our heritage, it’s very long and rich. There is much to understand.”

A site in Huanchaco where archaeologist Julio Asencio found human remains – the area was a centre for child sacrifice.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

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In 1911, an American academic and explorer named Hiram Bingham III was led by an eight-year-old farm boy through steep, dense jungle to the ruins of an ancient citadel, perched high in the cloud forest above the Urubamba Valley, in the Peruvian Andes. The ruined city, known as Machu Picchu, was overgrown with vines and moss, but through the mist and drizzle, Bingham identified what would become one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in the world – the so-called Lost City of the Incas. With its carved stone temples, palaces and storehouses, Machu Picchu has since become synonymous with the grandeur and ambition of the Inca, who controlled the largest pre-Hispanic empire in all South America. But the Inca, whose world came to an end with the arrival of the Spanish in the 1530s, were merely the last in a long line of ancient Andean cultures, including the Moche, Chimu and Nazca, each of which constructed a cosmovision as complex as any in the ancient world, and an art tradition that was as bizarre as it was beautiful.

“In ancient Peru, art conveyed valuable information about belief systems, identity and power,” says Dr Jacob Bongers, an American archaeologist who specialises in ancient Andean cultures. Bongers, who holds a PhD in Archaeology from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, now works at the University of Sydney, and is a guest expert for an exhibition called Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru, currently running at the Australian Museum. “This exhibition brings ancient Peru to the public,” he tells me. “It’s the largest collection of ancient Andean gold to travel outside of Peru.”

US archaeologist Jacob Bongers says ancient Andean art conveyed information about identity and beliefs.Credit: A. Dumitru

Sydney is only the fourth city in the world to host the exhibition, after Paris, Milan and Boca Raton, in Florida. Curated by the Larco Museum in Lima, the show includes more than 130 objects from 10 ancient Peruvian cultures spanning 3000 years. There are golden ornaments and body armour, silver jaguars, condors and snakes; there are gods of the sea and moon, and surreal renderings of transmorphic shamen, who, powered by hallucinogenic cacti, could change shape and travel through worlds. There is a sacrificial knife similar to those discovered by Julio Asencio in Huanchaco, and a Moche silver goblet that was used to collect the blood of sacrificed warriors, whose lives were offered to placate the gods.

For those interested in indigenous South American history and society, the exhibition is a fascinating primer. “The Andean worldview was centred on balance and reciprocity,” says Bongers. “It was also a place where the natural and the spiritual worlds were deeply interconnected.” At the intersection of this cosmic Venn diagram were animals, and most particularly owls, which were revered. Owls could fly, yet often nested in the ground. They were capable, then, of inhabiting the three different realms; the underworld, which was associated with death and the afterlife, the upperworld, associated with divine forces, and the earthly sphere of the here and now. Snakes were emissaries of the underworld, pumas were of the here and now, but owls were a triple threat.

The exhibition also features an inordinate number of drinking vessels, mainly ceramics. This is no accident. Liquids – including, of course, rain, but also blood and semen – were critically important. Without them, crops couldn’t grow and procreation would be impossible. They may also have contained ceremonial beverages, including chicha, a mildly alcoholic corn beer made from fermented maize. Chicha was and remains an important drink in Peru: it’s sold in plastic bottles by roadside vendors; you can also buy it at markets, such as the frenetic Mercado Central de San Pedro, in Cusco, for 50 cents a cup. (There are lots of different kinds but the chicha I drank was mildly fizzy and powerfully sweet.) Today’s “sober curious” movement would have bemused ancient Andeans. Drunkenness was considered by many in pre-Hispanic Peru to be a state of “strength”, much sought-after, since being moderately inebriated – somewhere between tipsy and falling down – constituted a state of equilibrium, while also making it possible to contact beings from the world beyond.

Digs in and around Huanchaco have found artefacts as well as human remains.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

The ancient Peruvians were nothing if not industrious. Machu Picchu and the Nazca Lines hog the magazine covers and travel brochures, but the country is almost comically crowded with ruins. Just in the La Libertad region, in the north, where Huanchaco and Trujillo are located, there are 1000 recognised archaeological sites. Drive along the Pan-American Highway here and you pass countless ancient burial mounds, rising out of fields of sugarcane and corn, many the size of houses. Most of these structures are in people’s backyards, but officially they belong to the state. There isn’t enough money – or archaeologists – to explore them all. “Until then, they are subject to destruction, looting, and invasion by squatters,” Prieto tells me via email.

Prieto grew up in Huanchaco. Much like Rafael Larco Hoyle, who founded the Larco Museum in Lima, in 1926, Prieto has been instrumental in bringing Peru’s cultural heritage to a wider audience. But his most striking discoveries, that of the mass graves in Huanchaco, happened by accident, in 2011, when he heard about some local kids who kept finding human bones in a vacant lot near their home. The discovery was groundbreaking. “Until then we didn’t know about child sacrifice in Chimu society,” he says. He initially thought the grave was an anomaly. But as he uncovered more such sites, his ideas changed. “We now think that child and camelid [llama] sacrifices were a structural component of Chimu religion and sociopolitical organisation. I call it ‘sanctified violence’, where a political organisation like the Chimu exerted social cohesion through ritual violence – in this case, child sacrifice.”

The Chimu are thought to have developed from the Moche, who lived around Trujillo between 200BC and 800AD. The Moche were skilled builders and metalworkers, who produced some of ancient Peru’s most exquisite jewellery. The Australian Museum exhibition is full of such pieces: my favourite was an ear ornament featuring gorgeous golden iguanas inlaid with turquoise. What strikes you most about them, apart from the artisanship, is how contemporary they are. There is a gold and turquoise pendant in a boho spiral design which wouldn’t look out of place in Byron Bay.

Moche gold iguana earrings.Credit: Cain Cooper

But the Moche are perhaps best known for their erotic ceramics – the so-called “sex pots”. The exhibition includes a ceramic jug depicting ritualised fellatio, and another of a woman with an oversized vagina, complete with clitoris. Particularly memorable is a ceremonial jug of a cadaverous man, teeth bared, eyes wide, sporting an enormous erection, which serves as the jug’s spout. The rim of the vessel is perforated, making it difficult to drink from top, forcing the user to imbibe from the tumescent member.

The ceramics are certainly explicit: it’s amazing how much gynaecological detail a skilled ceramicist can fit onto one small bottle. They are also comprehensive, depicting vaginal and oral sex, anal penetration and masturbation. But they are not gratuitous. “The Moche lived in an environment where water was scarce and irrigation was critical for survival,” says Bongers. “Rituals and representations that symbolised the flow and exchange of vital fluids [including semen] may have been metaphors for the successful management of water and fertility.” In other words, the ceramics might look pornographic, but they are actually about farming.

Priapic “sex pots” thought to symbolise Moche society’s reliance on liquidsCredit: Cain Cooper

In a modern culture which privileges titillation over meaning, the “sex pots” have had a colourful second life. In 2022, Trujillo’s then mayor, Arturo Fernández, commissioned a fibreglass sculpture of a three-metre-high Moche man with a giant crimson erection. The structure, which was placed along the roadside leading to an important Moche ruin outside town, proved popular: visitors stopped to get photos of themselves leaning against the man’s leg or swinging from his member. The mayor claimed the statue was a priapic homage to the region’s peculiar cultural heritage. But in this predominantly Catholic country, it was bound to be controversial. A week after its installation, the penis was smashed and the structure then burnt to the ground. Rather than back away, the mayor doubled down, installing another seven plus-size erotic replicas, this time in fire-retardant varnish. They now stand in a dedicated laneway, off the main road, next to a soccer pitch and a fun park. The day I visit, two women are kneeling before the largest of the statues, arms out in mock worship. They are laughing so hard they can barely stand up.

Most people think that ancient Andean cultures, especially the Inca, esteemed gold above all else. But for the Inca, at least, gold was not especially highly valued. It had symbolic and religious significance, due to its lustre and incorruptibility, and was often associated with the sun (silver was associated with the moon). But it was not valued in monetary terms or as a currency. They must have been perplexed, then, by the Spanish, who were driven to the point of madness by their lust for precious metals. In 1532, the conquistador Francisco Pizarro kidnapped the Inca emperor Atahualpa and held him to ransom. Atahualpa promised the Spanish that he would fill a room with gold, and another two rooms with silver. The Inca duly stripped their temples and palaces and delivered the gold and silver to the Spanish: the gold alone weighed six tonnes. But Pizarro executed Atahualpa anyway. The Spanish then melted the gold down into ingots, which they divided among themselves.

As far as bling went, the Inca preferred jade, turquoise and feathers, including those from the hummingbird and macaw. As with the Moche before them, they adored Spondylus, a thorny red oyster which was harvested off the coast of Ecuador. Its shells were made into mesmerising pectorals, a kind of decorative shawl worn over the upper chest. (There is a particularly beautiful one in the exhibition.) Spondylus also became a type of currency and were traded as far north as Mexico. But what the Inca valued above all were textiles. Tunics, wall hangings, blankets – these were the real Inca gold. Indeed, one of the first things that the Inca gave the Spanish when they arrived was a piece of embroidery, which no doubt left the conquistadors somewhat underwhelmed. “Textiles were highly prized and considered a form of wealth and status because of the immense skill and labour required to produce them,” says Bongers. “From raising alpacas and llamas for wool to spinning, dyeing and weaving intricate patterns, textile production was a time-consuming and highly specialised craft.”

Moche-inspired erotic statues near Trujillo have become a tourist attraction.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

The Inca were also consummate administrators, managing to run a 2-million-square-kilometre empire incorporating myriad ethnic groups and a road network that would put most state government transport departments to shame. This is even more remarkable when you consider that they didn’t have a written language. Instead, they used a technology called the quipu, a series of knotted strings which hang off a primary cord. Quipus were originally developed by the Wari people several centuries earlier, but the Inca adapted them into a logistical tool and a decimal counting system. Through quipus, which were transported via a system of relay runners, the Inca were able to keep a detailed record of everything that was produced, stored, and consumed in their empire.

But they were intentionally cryptic. Only special functionaries, called quipucamayocs, could interpret them. Indeed, quipus later became a secret weapon for the Inca in the battle against the Spanish. “Their complexity made them largely indecipherable to the Spanish,” Bongers explains. “The Spanish recognised this and often viewed quipus with suspicion. Some colonial officials even ordered their destruction, fearing that they were being used to coordinate rebellions.”

Quipus still baffle researchers. It’s long been thought they were mainly numerical, like abacuses. But American anthropologist Sabine Hyland, who has devoted a large part of her career to quipus, has since 2011 been investigating the possibility that they may contain a kind of alphabet, and that they could even be a type of writing. “This is a writing system that is inherently three-dimensional, dependent on touch as well as sight,” Hyland told New Scientist magazine in 2018. Using this tangled kind of braille must have required, as she put it, “a different way of being in the world”.

Of the many thousands of quipus that were used over the centuries, only 600 remain. The fact that there is one in the Australian Museum exhibition – a magnificent specimen, 1.7 metres across, with 326 braids in 29 colours – is a coup. Standing before it is a journey into mystery. You instinctively ask it questions: What are you saying? What are you telling us? And in return it asks you only one thing: to be content with not knowing.

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One day towards the end of my stay in Peru, Julio Asencio, the archaeologist at the National University of Trujillo, takes me to meet Javier Huamanchumo, a fisherman in Huanchaco. Huaman-chumo is on the beach, getting ready to go fishing. He is 40, with smooth, caramel-coloured skin, and strong across the shoulders from pulling in nets all his life. He still goes to sea in a caballito de totora, or reed boat, sometimes as far as 1.5 kilometres off shore. The boats are small – just enough for one person – and quaintly toy-like, just bundles of reeds tightly bound together by cord. They fall apart after a few months but it doesn’t matter, because they’re cheap to make and operate, since they don’t require gasoline or maintenance. They are exactly the same craft that the people have been fishing with here for thousands of years. The only thing that has changed is the fish. “These days, there are less of them,” he tells me. The other problem is the waves. “When there is surf, it’s hard to get out, so the locals turn to tourism, paddling visitors around in the caballitos.”

Fisherman Javier Huamanchumo; the reed boats he uses are similar to those used by his ancestors.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Like most Peruvians, Huamanchumo is mestizo, meaning he is of Spanish and Indigenous descent. I was wondering if he has any misgivings about strangers digging up his ancestors, their children and their belongings and putting them in museums halfway across the world. In Australia, I say, this would be problematic. “Why?” he says. “It’s good! Local people here want to be part of the ancient culture. It’s good that people come to look and are interested.”

He says that there is much more to discover. “This stuff is everywhere – I come across pots and necklaces made with shells in my own backyard. It connects me to my people. My culture. I’m proud of it.” Then he apologises. “I’m going fishing now, if you don’t mind.” He picks up his caballito, and heaves it down the sand, to the water’s edge. He places it in the water and heads out to sea, toward the horizon, to see what he can find.

Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru is on at the Australian Museum, Sydney, until May 11. Tim Elliott and Dominic Lorrimer travelled to Peru courtesy of the Australian Museum, Adventure World and LATAM Airlines.

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