Two temples whose use has largely been lost to us, though we do have some theories

Shockingly their demise appears to have been thanks to a bad case of El Nino, something that isn’t unfamiliar to us down here in the southern hemisphere.

What are they?

Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna, translate to the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon, and are believed to have been built by the Moche people. This incredible legacy left behind thanks to the Moche culture are located not too far from Trujillo in Peru, and is seen to be an archaeological capital in the country, with the Incan capital, Cusco being another.

The temples, or huacas, are basically just two pyramids, obviously these days they’re more ruins than fully formed pyramids, but we think that they would have been used by worshippers back in the day. And you can’t really miss them either. The surrounding area is pretty much desert, as much of coastal Peru tends to be, so these pyramids sticking up out of the landscape would really have been a sight to behold when they were in their prime.

We’ll get into how the two temples differ from each in just a moment, but let’s have a look at what they’re made of. Similar to a lot of the pyramids of the time, the huacas are made out of adobe bricks. Adobe bricks are basically just mud bricks, so mud hardened in a rectangular or square shape. And they would have been used, much like bricks are used today to create these massive temples each reaching what archaeologists think to be about 50 metres high. And even though the temples no longer reach this height, they’re still pretty bloody impressive to look at.

Now what’s really interesting about the Moche, the culture historians believed built the huacas, is that they didn’t seem to be a fan of tearing down temples. If a temple wasn’t able to provide the space for what was needed, or had started to become in need of repair, instead of knocking the old one down to make room for the new temple, the Moche just built right on over the old one. They would build on top of the previous temple, adding what they needed in a new temple, which very quickly made the temples larger than before. Often they would build over the exterior of the old temple, which worked out very well for future archaeologists because all the artwork and colours that was on the old exterior was now preserved from the damaging effects of sunlight and the elements.

And it was through this fashion that the Moche developed these massive religious complexes that we see at the Huaca de Moche.

Thought to have been constructed by the Moche and made their capital between the 1st and 8th centuries, it’s believed that the city saw at least six major construction phases over a span of about 600 years. So it seemed the Moche weren’t happy with well enough, and also seemed to be constantly improving their environment for their changing needs.

Now the area isn’t just about these two massive huacas, this place was a major city and needed all the extras that busy cities come with. The two temples are separated by about 500 metres of what is now open desert, but when the Moche were around, this empty space would have contained houses, dwellings and buildings for all sorts of things that range from the industrial to the religious to the residential. Meaning that the Moche didn’t see the area just as a political or ceremonial centre but as a liveable city.

Of the two temples, Huaca de la Luna, while being the smaller of the two, does appear to be the main attraction. Believed to be used for religious and ceremonial activities the Temple of the Moon hides a rich cultural expression by the Moche within the walls of its overlapping interiors. We’ve already discovered that when a temple fell out of use, the Moche would build right over the top of it, burying and preserving old murals and creating new friezes, and it’s these beautifully adorned friezes that the Huaca de la Luna is known for. Because each level of the temple and its corresponding friezes was created at a different time, the development of the art form and of the stylised figures represented can be clearly seen. The friezes of the Huaca de la Luna come in a variety of colours and represent a range of religious figures and mythical beings. Coloured with white, blue, red, yellow and black you can see depictions of warriors, gods like Ai-Apaec, and figures in relief such as spiders, snakes, foxes, condors and many more. Our Nazca Lines episode really goes into the significance of some of these animals to the desert coastal populations and cultures of Peru where water and agricultural fertility were of great importance for obvious reasons.

While bigger, the Huaca del Sol is these days just a ruin. But back in the day it’s thought that this Temple of the Sun was the largest pre-Columbian structure in all of Peru, that’s quite the achievement and just shows how advanced the Moche civilisation really was. Like its sister temple, the Huaca del Sol is a stepped pyramid made of terraces and what’s estimated to be about 130-140 million adobe bricks. The size of this Huaca alone is a pretty impressive sight. It’s believed to have been built in 8 different stages, so eight temples built atop one another, but the timing of these stages do tend to move around a bit, although archaeologists are confident that it would have been built and completed no later than 600 AD.

The Moche Culture

So what do we really know about the Moche, the people who built this amazing place? Like many ancient advanced civilisations a lot of their beginnings and endings are lost to us, making the culture appear that much more mysterious. It’s thought that the Moche people as a culture came about in the 1st century, but by the 9th century had largely disappeared. But what they left behind, like their architecture and cultural expression in the form of art and pottery, has allowed historians to piece together just how much of an important civilisation they were to the history of Peru. There are even theories that they pioneered hydraulic engineering in their effort to direct water to some of the driest parts of their region. And it wasn’t only the engineering side of things, the Moche are well known for their agricultural developments and their extensive knowledge of metallurgy.

While we know that the Moche were the ones to build the Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna these names were not what the Moche knew the temples by, these are names given by modern historians and archaeologists. The Moche may have not even seen these structures as temples at all. Even the name for the area, Huacas del Moche, has come about only because it was the Moche people who built them.

What’s pretty crazy is the name ‘Moche’ probably wasn’t even what the Moche people called themselves. They were given that name by modern archaeologists because of the proximity of the first archaeological site where their culture was discovered to the Moche River Valley.

What we can figure out about the Moche though, is that they were an extremely advanced civilisation of early Peru, and that is plain to see in their building techniques, their art and the ceramics left behind. Thanks to tombs being found we even know that the Moche had hierarchical political structures and may have even been organised into kingdoms. But as to the particulars, unfortunately they’re largely lost to us.

Thanks to the fact that the Moche has no written language, or no evidence of one has been found, it means that what we can interpret from their art and ceramics is everything we know about the Moche civilisation. And that’s what makes the Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna so important. It’s the wealth of knowledge about the Moche culture that they contain that enables them to be a central point of focus for many studying the Moche people.

From what has been discovered so far, the religion of the Moche appears to have been quite similar to what we see in other South American cultures around the same time. We have multiple gods that seem to be a blend of human and animal, gods who represent important aspects of the agricultural cycle such as the moon, and deities that even take the form of important animals in their landscape such as jaguars or giant spiders.

As much as archaeologists can glean, the Moche appear to be relatively peaceful, with little to no major conflicts with surrounding cultures during the time that they were active. And yet, just at the point that they should have been at their strongest, they seem to have disappeared. Although some theories do suggested that the Moche culture could have evolved into the Chimu, who are well known for building the fascinating city of Chan Chan.

What were they used for?

Now what is a huaca, what does it really mean? These days its translated pretty simply as a temple, but in the ancient Quechuan language it can be a bit more complicated. Like most translations a fair bit of context and meaning gets lost. A more accurate translation for ‘huaca’ would be an object or a building that is used to revere something. So a ‘huaca’ could very well be a religious monument or a religious complex like we see in the Huacas de Moche, but it could also be a natural formation like a mountain or other object in the landscape.

So it stands to reason that archaeologists believed that the Huaca de la Luna was the religious and ceremonial centre of the Moche, and that the Huaca del Sol was primarily used for administrative purposes and even the burial of rulers. This doesn’t mean that the Huaca de la Luna didn’t have its own deaths though, there is evidence of sacrifices being carried out. Historians think that the Moche would have ‘fight’ ceremonies, similar to the gladiatorial fights of the Colosseum, where the loser of the fight would be slaughtered and their decapitated head offered to the god Ai-Apaec, who was otherwise known as the rather ominous ‘The Headsman’.

While it seems that we know a fair bit about the Huaca de la Luna and its role in Moche culture, thanks to how much has been preserved and has survived of this temple. We know significantly less about the Huaca del Sol. Apart from the suggestion that it was the administrative centre for the Moche, there isn’t a whole lot more we can glean about this temple, mainly thanks to the destructiveness of the invading Spanish, though we’ll get more into this in a moment.

Huaca del Sol does appear to have been used for some ritual and ceremonial activities as well as being a royal residence and containing burial chambers, and it would have the room for it thanks to its larger size. And it does make sense to have the administrative and military functions happening in the same place you live and sleep. But something that’s kind of thrown historians off a little bit, is that a majority of the tombs found do appear to be those of sacrificed prisoners and not the persons of nobility you would expect to find, although some archaeologists do theorise that the noble tombs could be sitting undiscovered further within the pyramid. And this theory is supported by the grave goods that have been found, the items do suggest possession by a political leader, so there is the thought that the political elite could have resided and been entombed in the Huaca del Sol, while the religious elite could have lived and been entombed in the Huaca de la Luna. There’s a lot still to unpack about these two magnificent structures, and who knows what archaeologists and historians will find in the future.

Why are they no longer used?

Now we come to why the Huacas de Moche fell out of use. And the environment certainly did play its part. The last 1500 years that the huacas have been sitting unused and unloved has resulted in a considerable amount of damage, and they don’t look too much better today.

We know that the Moche were a largely peaceful culture with very little fighting between themselves and other groups, so the idea that they were conquered is not a theory that is greatly supported. It seems to be a series of quite serious and dramatic climatic events that seems to have been the Moche’s undoing, and then the subsequent devolving into infighting for resources that were just too scarce to support such a large population. So the most supported theory surrounding the demise of the Moche culture is one that we ourselves are facing today: climate change.

It's believed that a large flood around 560 is what led the Moche to officially abandon the Huaca del Sol, and it’s the extreme El Nino events that’s thought to have done the most damage to the huaca, and then of course of the Spanish had to leave their mark, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet.

Scientists have been intrigued by this almost overnight abandonment of the Huacas de Moche and so they have decided to do what they do best: scientific research. By drilling ice cores into glaciers in the Andes, they were able to determine that this particular part of Peru was subjected to a super El Nino event in the 6th century. Now while we down here in the Southern Hemisphere have had our own rather dramatic El Nino events lately, they haven’t been anything as bad as what the Moche endured. The Ice cores revealed that Peru suffered 30 years of flooding, that was immediately followed by 30 years of drought. So they went from a ridiculous amount of rain for what was pretty much an entire lifetime back then, to a life time of struggling for life-giving water.

For a society that relied so heavily on agriculture, like the Moche did, and like so many early civilisations have done, this dramatic change in climate would have been absolutely devasting. But from what archaeologists can gather, this was just the start of the Moche’s downfall. If it was just the weather, they probably could have endured it and come out the other side. But something far darker happened, that, not to scare anyone, could also be in our future.

Like so many religions, particularly for those societies and cultures dependent on agriculture, which if we’re being honest is all of us, we all gotta eat, the religious priests were considered the elite, because it was believed that they could control the weather, primarily through sacrifice and prayer, whether that be human sacrifice or animal sacrifice we see this throughout the world, and throughout cultures that would have never come in contact, like the Celts, or the ancient Greeks, it’s even in the damn Bible. So sacrificing something important to the Gods for something favourable in return is an acceptable way of being religious. Now of course that doesn’t have to be bloodshed, we still offer prayers to our chosen God or Gods in almost all religions in practice today.

But what happened with the Moche, is when the, most likely human, sacrifices appeared to no longer be working to stop the rain, or to bring the rain back, the people lost their faith. And we know they tried really bloody hard to get back on the gods good side because archaeologists have excavated hundreds of decapitated skeletons, believed to have been sacrificed during this time in an effort to appease the gods.

But with these religious practices no longer appearing to work, the people started to question the political and religious leaders of their society. And the more the leader’s assured the masses that they could fix the situation and the longer the situation remained unfixed, the more chaos started to become the norm. People were being killed in an attempt to stop the rain, but the more people who were killed the more rain that fell. Not only do you have the grief over this way of death, even if it was an accepted way to die, you’re still losing a family member or a friend, you also have people starving for food, and this went on for decades. It was only a matter of time before things started to devolve. 

What’s interesting about this period, is that archaeologists have found evidence that fortifications were built within the Moche territory, but the lack of evidence of any threat from outside the community is puzzling, until you consider the idea that the threat wasn’t from the outside but rather from within the Moche people. It appears that the Moche turned on each other. Desperate for the resources that became scarcer as the days went on, the community became frantic. Any resemblance of civility disappeared and a civil war broke out with possession and defence of important resources such as irrigation channels or fertile agricultural land all of sudden became the way of life. This fear and reality of a lack of resources forced the Moche people to resort to abandoning their peaceful ideals and fighting for whatever they could to survive.

Now this of course is just a theory, based on archaeological evidence, but a theory none the less, and we don’t really know if the Moche people died out, if they didn’t survive the 60 year climate ordeal, or if perhaps some of them did survive. But what we do know is that later on, there’s evidence that the whole area was populated by the Chimu people. So some historians suggest that what was left of the Moche then became the Chimu, but once again, unfortunately we’ll never know what truly happened, we can only look at what the evidence shows us. And the Chimu weren’t around forever themselves, by the 15th century, the Inca had come in and dominated.

But it’s when the Spanish arrived in the 16th century that we start to gain a clearer idea of the times, thanks to Spanish recordings. So I think we’re all aware of Spain’s fascination, dare I say obsession, with gold. And the idea they had was that South America was full of the stuff, if only they could find it.

So in the early 17th century, the Spanish turned their attention to the Huaca del Sol and their idea that the temple was hiding treasures of gold. But how to get to that gold. Well there was a river right there that could do the job. So the Spanish changed the course of the Moche river, redirecting the water in the hope that it’s force would erode the Huaca del Sol, ideally splitting the temple in two, and revealing the hordes of gold that had been placed inside. Unfortunately for the Spanish, none of this happened, yes they redirected the river and yes the force of the water did erode the Huaca del Sol, but about a third of the temple was washed away, leaving what we can see now, and shockingly there was no gold whatsoever to be found.

Now there could still be gold hidden deep inside the Huaca del Sol, the temple hasn’t exactly been extensively excavated, so there could well be riches discovered in the future, but a lack of funding has severely limited the work that archaeologists can carry out.

It was after this rather untimely destruction thanks to the Spanish that the whole site was largely abandoned, and people didn’t start getting interested in the Huacas de Moche until excavations began by professional archaeologists in the 1990s, so relatively recently.

It was in 2001 that the World Monument Fund joined the project of excavating and preserving the Huacas de Moche. And they’re involvement can not only be seen in matching funds to support the program with the aim of preserving and developing the whole site for cultural tourism, but also in the structures built over the huacas to prevent further erosion thanks to the wind blowing sand across the face of the structures.

Visiting the Huacas

If you yourself wish to visit the Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna, you’ll need to get about 8 hours north of Lima and about 25 minutes south from Trujillo. But it’s not like Machu Picchu, there are restaurants and places to stay within the precinct.

Because of its state, Huaca del Sol is closed to visitors, but that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate the grandeur of its sheer size. Although you can explore the Huaca de la Luna and see the amazing friezes. The entrance fee does include a guide, although I’m told you may need to wait for there to be enough for a group before the tour can get started.

Not 600 metres away from the carpark for the Huaca de la Luna is the impressive Museo Huacas de Moche, which is an excellently laid out museum displaying objects excavated from the sites, and not to worry if your Spanish isn’t up to scratch the written descriptions are in both Spanish and English. In fact it’s probably a good idea to head on over the Museum first because it’s here that you can buy your ticket and join your tour for the Huaca de la Luna.

It was actually extremely recently in 2011 that a new tourist circuit was opened allowing tourists to walk through the Huaca de la Luna. The circuit includes walkways so that you can get up nice and close to the friezes and its these walkways that allow you to walk throughout the different levels and see all the aspects of the temple.

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