S3 E2 The Moche
The Moche were an amazingly advanced civilization who lived along Peru’s northern coast from about 100 to 750 CE. In this episode, I’ll explain how I believe that they were monotheistic, worshipping a creator deity I call the Fanged Deity.
Show Notes
My 1994 Mesa de Brujo paper with Richard Schaedel’s comments
Links to Donnan’s “Presentation Ceremony”, later renamed the “Sacrifice Ceremony”:
A good website about Moche pottery scene themes by Dumbarton Oaks:
https://www.doaks.org/resources/moche-iconography/narrative-themes
Ed — My husband and I have been following you for years. If we added up all that time plus the time we have spent reading and learning about all of this, I think we would have at least masters degrees by now. Anyway, we agree with your interpretations (here and elsewhere) and appreciate your sensitivity towards and love for the ancestors of the people you study.
Thanks Charr! If I had the authority to give you that degree, I’d do it 🙂 Thanks for listening and for your kind words.
Edd,
I agree with Charr, it is a pleasure learning from you and is very gratifying, specially because I was born and live in Mexico, to feel the respect you have for our ancestral cultures.
I also agree with your interpretations, they make a lot of sense
Keep on the great work and thanks for sharing, it is deeply enjoyed and appreciated
Dear Ed,
I literally binged listen all your episodes within two weeks. Great podcast. So cool to hear about this subject from an actual archaeologist and not some journalist/click bait oriented person. Thank you for your good work!
Wow! Thank you so much! It’s so nice to know that my efforts are appreciated. I’ll keep at it.
Ed- I am a high school student and struggling to find resources. Do you have any suggestions on where I could start with the Moche people, specifically the Fanged Deity? I also would love a place to start with any part of Maya Civilization but there is just so much!
Hi Emma! Thanks for listening to my podcast. There is no book on the Fanged Deity – I still have to write that one! But my papers on him and Moche related stuff are at:https://www.mayaexploration.org/research_pubs.php . A good book on the Moche – “The Art and Archaeology of the Moche”, edited by Steve Bourget and Kimberly Jones. But knowing you’re a HS student, you would probably prefer internet sources. For that, check out http://www.academia.edu . It’s a searchable database of 1000’s of academic papers. Just type Moche into its search bar and see what comes up.
Another wonderful presentation!! Thank you Dr. Ed !
Watching your great course on ancient South American in mid-1999, the single most important episode that struck us and made immediate sense was your postulation and interpretation of the Fanged Deity as the Supreme Being having emerged from the Amazonian wilderness to reign over the entire spread of Andean (urban) civilization. This is because we had arrived at a similar understanding of his ‘Terrifying’ (Bhairava) counterpart in South Asia. Yes, the latter has been exalted as the supreme God over the rest of the polytheistic pantheon, but he is celebrated above all as pervading the whole pantheon and the universe itself as its *monistic* foundation. For this reason, the ‘monotheistic’ Fanged Deity would be better understood as Absolute Reality that does not negate the ‘pan-animism’ of the Amazonian peoples.