The Moche civilization flourished along the and north coast of Peru between A.D. 100 and 800. Thousands of farmers and fisherfolk lived under the rule of a small number of authoritarian warrior-priests. The Moche lords never ruled vast domains, just a strip of some four hundred kilometers of coastal desert between the Lambayeque Valley in the north and the Nepefia Valley in the south. Their subjects dwelt along the Pacific or in dry river valleys that fingered no more than about one hundred kilometers inland through one of the driest environments on earth. The lords themselves lived apart from their subjects, in high palaces set atop massive adobe pyramids that gleamed brightly in the sun. They presided over an orderly, well-organized world, defined by a vivid and still little-known set of religious beliefs. But it was a world plagued by droughts and El Nino.

The warrior-priests lived in a world of their own, far from the daily work in the irrigated fields beneath their magnificent pyramids. As far as we can tell, their lives revolved around warfare, ritual, and diplomacy, in an endless cycle of competition for prestige with their fellow leaders. Each river valley had one or two royal courts, all of them connected by ties of kin and mutual obligation. judging from royal graves, each warrior-priest wore the same insignia and ceremonial trappings. Moche lords went to war over land and water supplies. Painted Moche pots show vivid scenes of armies fighting with raised clubs and feather-decked shields. Other paintings depict naked prisoners of war paraded before the warrior-priest dressed in his full ceremonial regalia. At a signal, executioners decapitated the captives or strangled them. As the victims choked to death, their penises sometimes became erect in a potent symbol of human fertility. This act of sacrifice in the presence of the warrior-priest validated lordly power over human life. The arrogant Moche lords were the intermediaries between the living and the forces of the spiritual world that could wreak awful havoc on their coastal homeland.

We do not know the names of the first Moche rulers, or any details of their military campaigns or of the diplomatic alliances that linked valley to valley over generations. We do know from their burials that they were people of remarkable wealth and power.

In the late 1980s, the Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva excavated three unlooted warrior-priest burials from an adobe platform at Sipan in the Lambayeque Valley, center of the Moche world around A.D. 400. Each burial lay inside an adobe brick burial chamber, one placed above the other in a mortuary platform set among the imposing pyramids that rose dramatically out of the heavily cultivated river valley. Each warrior-priest lay in his ceremonial garb. Their regalia never changed from one generation to the next-elaborate gold masks and crescentlike headdresses that once glinted in the bright sun, cotton tunics adorned with dozens of copper gilt plates, bead pectorals and silver or gold ear pendants with hinged figures of warriors-silver symbolizing the moon, gold the sun. Anyone gazing on a warrior-priest shining in golden splendor was left in no doubt of his ability to control the forces of the Moche world.

Royal artisans crafted their masters in clay. The great men gaze haughtily into space with the calm assurance of unquestioned political and spiritual authority. Moche society was a social pyramid, erected on the backs of anonymous villagers who worked in the fields and on irrigation canals, paying a yearly tax in labor for the good of the state. Thousands of villagers labored to build enormous royal pyramids, to construct and maintain canals and irrigation systems to feed their lords and a privileged few. Like Egyptian pharaohs, the Moche lords depended for their power on their ability to provide water, ample crop yields, and food surpluses to tide every village through drought years and floods. Under the powerful religious ideology that linked rulers and the ruled, warriorpriests interceded with the spiritual forces that controlled an and land.

The Moche civilization had two economic pillars. Their brilliant farming expertise harnessed mountain runoff and fertile soils with large irrigation systems capable of producing substantial grain surpluses and acres of cotton for their fine textiles. The floodplains of the Lambayeque, Moche, and other coastal valleys formed green patchwork quilts of closely packed irrigated fields, nourished by long canals. Thousands of hours of cultivation, ditch digging, and maintenance went into the Moche field systems. However, everything depended on careful sharing of mountain runoff, an annual gift in the hands of the spiritual world.

The second pillar was a bountiful Pacific. Coastal upwelling brought swarms of anchovy to feed, and Moche fisherfolk in their reed boats harvested millions of anchovy throughout the year. They dried whole fish in the sun or ground their catch into nutritious fish meal. Thousands of kilograms of protein-rich fish meal traveled from the coast to amplify the carbohydrate diet of highland farmers far inland. The anchovy, by helping to support a large nonagricultural population, was of vital economic importance to the Moche.

The same anchovy bounty fed enormous numbers of seabirds such as cormorants. In turn, the Moche mined bird guano from offshore islands and spread it as fertilizer on their fields. Rivers, marshes, and freshwater lagoons provided additional food.

In normal times the Moche had an abundant and nutritious diet, with enough food to support high population densities, not only farmers and fisherfolk but the thousands of non-food producers who labored on irrigation works and supervised the building of enormous pyramids, palaces, and temples. Each major center supported skilled artisans who labored in clay, cotton, and metals to produce magnificent artworks and formal regalia for the tiny numbers of people who controlled the destiny of the state.

With such ample food supplies, the Moche could have prospered indefinitely but for three spoilers: drought cycles, earthquakes, and El Nino.

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