well it's a pleasure to have all of you here many of you students from classes of mine it's also great to have professor john verano here with us from Tulane University where he is a professor of anthropology and as I understand just recovering from being chair and I'm sure he misses that misses it dearly John did his PhD at UCLA a number of years back and one of the interesting sort of footnotes in John's career is while he was a PhD student he was also a bodyguard for share among other celebrities so a useful useful bit of advice for graduate students if you're looking for additional employment when I was first getting into osteology when I was a student back in the 1990s any mention of South American osteology was synonymous with John Verano he's really sort of the figure that got osteology off the ground and really sort of been the public public sphere of attention in the last few decades and if you know anything about the field of osteology today it's sort of one of the hotspots where people go and it's really part of the legacy goes back to John's work especially beginning in the 1980s on to the 1990s and as a result of that work much of which has been focused on the Moche which is one of the archaeological groups of the area John's produced over 50 publications on his work I started counting and then I got tired of it so I don't know the exact number but it's well over 50 much of it like I said focusing on mochi warfare and mochi violence which is what John is going to be talking about tonight he's also the author of two books with a third one on the way that will be out in 2014 which I can guarantee was absolutely phenomenal in addition to his work on the mochi however John also has an interest in trepanation which is some of you may know is ancient cranial surgery as a result of this he's appeared in many fantastic and fascinating documentaries and news programs over the years and if you can ever track any of those down it's worth worth taking a look at those and in addition to his work on osteology in South America John also doubles as a forensic anthropologist consulting in the state of Louisiana so he's certainly quite busy so I'll now turn it over to John thanks very much Andrew I didn't think you were going to mention my bodyguarding years and I won't talk about that tonight but that seems to be one of the most interesting things to my graduate students they want to hear more stories about also Joan Rivers Dean Martin and a few others that I worked for that was just a moonlighting thing I basically did my homework in their kitchens or living rooms to make them feel safer I'm not sure what okay and they always found it very odd that I was studying anthropology and skeletons but they said oh you go ahead good luck and I finally did finish my dissertation so I moved on to better things academia what I'd like to do tonight is talk about research that I've been doing for some years as as Andrew mentioned I don't really deserve a lot of credit for for South American osteology was just in the 80s not much was going on there not many people were there now there are many people as Andrew said working in that in South America particularly in Peru but also Bolivia Chile and and Ecuador and it's partly because people realize the potential of the archaeological record and some of the very interesting questions that can be asked and this ranges from everything from very simple societies to complex societies like we'll see in the Moche tonight so this opening slide will see the context closer up this one I just put is a nice visual this is sunrise this past summer over Cerro Blanco at the base of this hill Cerro Blanco means the white hill at the base of this Hill is the Moche site which is the type site for this particular culture and what yeah I don't know can can we can we turn down the stage lights do you know I don't know how to do that of course let's see if we can do that great great thank you I I like my images so I appreciate them in the dark although in my classes I'm always worried that the students are going to fall asleep so I'll check with you guys every now that make sure you're awake okay just one map that I'm going to show you and not bore you with for long but if you're not familiar with the mochi they were a culture roughly contemporary with the classic Maya the dates now for mochi are between about eighty one hundred and eighty nine hundred when the very last kind of gasp of mochi fades out when the culture kind of folds in on itself and just disappears as an entity and it's a big subject of debate what caused that but we'll take a look at kind of the full range of mojo tonight and we'll see that the things that I'll be showing you some of them date to the very last moments of what we would consider Moche culture the mochi dominated an area of shown in in lighter tan here of about five hundred kilometers north-south living in a series of river valleys and these red triangles represent some of the major mochi sites the pyramids of mochi is the type site named for the mochi River Valley and we're going to be focusing on discoveries here at this site in particular and mentioning a few others like El Brujo and c-pawn in this talk now just to show you what the mochi are well known for this is the Pyramid of the Sun there are two major platform mounds at the site of mochi and this this was one of the first places where max Woolley the German archaeologist in the nineteenth century began doing the first scientific excavations of mochi graves and architecture and he dug here at the Pyramid of the Sun and in other parts of this site pyramid of the Sun just to give you an idea this is arguably the largest adobe brick pyramids in the new world it is about 200 meters long by about 100 metres wide and about 10 stories high just to give you an idea built of solid mud bricks many many many millions of them and it's it's one of these huge structures that has been of course marking the landscape for centuries it was not the kind of sometimes people say how did you know where did where to dig at those sites or how did you find that site a so it was it's a big place everyone knows where it is if you live in the Moche Valley and you don't know where the Pyramid of the Sun is then you haven't been out of your house now the Moche are also of course best known for their artistic achievements they made some of the finest ceramics and and it was one of the most representational and realistic styles including things like these portrait head vessels of actual individuals that you can recognize they're they're individual features and other aspects of their head ornament and head cloths and so on these items of course are of great value to art museums the the huffin refere has a small noce collection and they have kindly put put these pieces on not these particular ones these are from different collections but they have some pieces on exhibit in the museum and after the talk I think we'll go over there and and people can see some of them including one portrait head of this particular type the Moche are also part of the problem with this of course is that it's led to a lot of looting of sites and destruction of sites over the years so it can be said safely that about 90 to 95 percent of Moche ceramics have no context they're in art museums private collections and that's unfortunate but what we'll see tonight is scientific excavation that's put a lot of these things in context now the Moche are also known and i can't help but show this one for exceptional metallurgy these are nose ornaments that this is a small sample of a total of 30 either 30 or 31 I'm not sure of the exact count they were found recently in a mummy bundle with a very high-status woman known as the Lady of cow or the Donna dead cow from the site of El Brujo just one Valley north of the Moche Valley and these nose ornaments are made in gold and silver and they depict various common mochi themes and I'll just point out one or two that are relevant to here are a paired warriors with their war clubs and one of the ceramic vessels in the - Reverend Museum is a seated warrior with his shield and Club and then there's some other scenes of mythical animals captive here with a rope around his neck and a captive on that side - something else that'll be relevant to our theme tonight now mo teri was understood for a long time primarily through interpretation that study of the ceramic vessels that they painted they did both modeled pieces and they did fine line painting in ceramics lip and classically in just two primary colors a cream and a reddish color and towards the middle to late time they made they developed a very beautiful fine line painting style somewhat similar and comparable perhaps to Greek vaz painting and this is something that's put them on the map and makes them particularly interesting culture because of the the detail with which they show certain things now speaking of the South American archaeology Kristin and was one of my committee members UCLA he's retired just a few years ago but still is active in publishing and writing writing up his many many decades of research on mochi he is without question the world authority on mochi iconography and so I've learned a lot from him and one of the things he said recently in a book on on mochi fine line painting is that of all the themes shown in mochi art and I'm not going to show you the other themes but they're themes of rituals and other and so on the most dominant theme the most common is what he calls the warrior and narrative and that's where you have warriors dressing for battle and then fighting one another in battle and then taking captives taking them back to other places and finally sacrificing them and he who controls he's developed the largest archive of mochi are in the world photographing things all over the world has is the the person who can say this because he's seen literally thousands and thousands of vessels so we're going to take a look at some of this what we're going to see is roll out drawings that were done by the late Donna McClelland a wonderful artist who worked with Chris for years and a good friend to all of us at UCLA she took these what Chris would do would be to photograph these things and then from various angles and then she would do rollout drawing so that you could kind of see what's on it and this is the rollout of that particular ceramic vessel the bottle shape now you have scenes of combat you have scenes of the taking of captives you can see captives grabbed by the hair or captive struck by a war club with his helmet coming off being defeated he's about to fall and then you see scenes of captives they are stripped of all of their finery their clothing their ear ornaments their helmets their weapons and they're marched back by the cap door to some other location where is that location well in there are a few scenes that show it and this is the most complex one and this used to be called the presentation theme because it was a presentation of a goblet to some kind of supernatural here Chris Donnan wrote about this in the 1970s and thought it might just be a mythical narrative because these are all supernaturals you see a bird warrior here you see a priestess with hair that ends in snakes everything is somewhat supernatural here there are several bottles that show this and what the scene shows in a few words is captives tied up having their throats slit and blood collected in cups and this is the way mochi show blood dripping down these cups are then marched to this particular person and presented to him and presumably he's drinking the blood of the captives what was fascinating was that in beginning in 1987 tombs began to come out of two sites first c-pawn and in San Jose tomorrow with people buried with the accouterments the dress of this warrior priest in this scene and a bird warrior and even a priestess a woman who participates in this scene so this was going to open the door in the beginning to the idea that the mochi in fact did they did these ceremonies where they impersonated God's doing sacrifice now not only on the portable art does this appear only in the last 15 years and in the case of huaca de la luna only a few years ago was the north facade of the pyramid of the moon-- which we'll see in this lecture exposed tons and tons of windblown sand had to be pulled away to expose it and very luckily that sand protected the details and this is a larger than life-size mural of warriors and you can now see perhaps the the weapons and gear carried on their war clubs they're leading a procession of captives around this platform and here is here is what the Pyramid of the moon looked like a few years ago when I was excavating back here this North facade is right here and it was covered with tons and tons of sand and I don't think anyone realized how well-preserved the murals actually were underneath I'd always thought of this is just kind of a rectangular thing with some looters holes and tunnels in it and not much other than the superstructure above but when they remove that sand here is a reconstruction from a couple years ago the North facade is richly decorated in polychrome murals and I'm going to show you a detail in just a minute but let's take a look at the structure in general there is platform one which is this is all called the Pyramid of the moon platform 1 platform 2 and we'll see later in a third platform this was clearly there was a large ramp going up to it and this on the summit were temples and and small rooms and a variety of things there was one large plaza and then there are some smaller plazas and other things attached to the back of it now this is a recent reconstruction of how that facade looks and actually if you go there today you can see all of these details this is courtesy of the huaca de la luna project borrow this image and publish it by the way the big publication is going to come out soon is Andrew and my co-author co-edited book Andrew is the primary editor of it and it's going to be a book on warfare and Mesoamerica and the Andes Dumbarton Oaks publication coming out of a symposium he and I organized a couple years ago so that should be great and and my chapter in that book will will cover well detail some of the things we'll talk about tonight so what you have is this procession of prisoners with ropes around their necks the Warriors leading them around going all the way around the plaza you know to me this reminds me of publicity Wall Street that kind of thing you know it's it's like a giant billboard it didn't flash but it did or in Times Square I guess you could have it today with the Warriors going around in a circle it's it really in in bold polychrome designs says something about the function of this temple and its importance now in this little section here is a what's called a corner room for lack of a better word that's what they're called has a little entrance inside and it has some detail detailed murals on it as well and I'm just going to show you a detail of it it shows these kind of these very repetitive scenes of again combat one-on-one combat these figures are all stylized they vary just a little bit in their headdress or the shape of their shield but for me it's it's another indication of this this is just kind of a some kind of a very stylized representational message about combat now whether each one of these pairs represents a particular battle or a particular group that was being fought or a particular event we don't know that's our problem unlike the Maya areas I'll mention later and in the Aztec world we don't have writing systems and so we don't have names we don't have dates we don't have a lot of information that could be so useful and trying to understand what this wall means all right now let's return to the architecture one thing that was missing from this picture was the captives themselves and the evidence that actually sacrificed did happen up until 1995 there was it there was no evidence that we could see and I'd been looking for it for years let's see pawn they had a couple of feet that had been cut off and found here and there at the site but nothing really that that indicated that that captives were were actually killed this would have to wait until 1995 when a plaza here plus a33 a that we'll see in a minute was excavated by a Canadian archaeologist Steve O'Shea and then a plaza three see a couple of years later I co-directed an excavation there for two field seasons and then we'll eventually see the latest things from platform 3 to wrap up things now Plaza 3a was is located here it was it was surrounded by architecture and there was a rocky outcrop in the middle of it and Steve or Jane found that very fascinating I always did too because it reminded me of Inca architecture where they enclosed living rock into their buildings like at Machu Picchu and saksaywaman and elsewhere and so many of us had looked at this thing and pondered the significance of this also it was somewhat of a reflection of the larger Cerro Blanco in the background so Steve who was interested in sacrifice and was looking at the theme of mountain sacrifices in the Moche decided to do some excavations around the base of it to see if he could find any evidence of ceremonial activity and of course he found much more than he wanted originally here is Steve in a white shirt here and one of my graduate students this is in 1995 we just happened to be on our way to El Brujo to do another project and Steve said you might want to stay in town for a while because this is your kind of stuff and it was over two years he excavated now we have more than a hundred skeletons from this particular context all around the rocky outcrop and these were in various states of disarticulation incompleteness of body positioning and in a few cases some evidence of trauma there where there's seems to be a skull fracture where the pieces eventually fallen out now Steve asked me to take a look at these things because he's an archaeologist and I'm a physical anthropologist and and so he was interested in the demographic composition are these males females can identify cause of death and things such as that so I spent two summers working on that material and what was interesting to go back for a minute some of them seem to be buried just in windblown sand just as just as if they were thrown down there and then left to decompose on the surface and there was good evidence of surface deep decomposition there were hundreds or thousands of fly pupae a little pupae cases of flies that feed on decaying humans and other other creatures others though seem to be embedded in mud you can see these things they're kind of stuck in mud and here are some interesting impressions of ropes probably ropes that bound their feet or their hands and he found one arm with the rope still have the impression right around it so I think that's what that is not a snake looks of the like a snake but this is a rope imprint this led Steve to hypothesize that perhaps the the the sacrifice was a response to some kind of crisis these things were were placed there it seemed during heavy rainfall and heavy rainfall only comes to the north coast in El Nino events they'll Nino Southern Oscillation which is an unpredictable but occasional event everyone was afraid there was going to be one this year it didn't turn out to be one but there was a big one in 83 when I first went to Peru and the desert was blooming with flowers instead of being a desert and Chris Don and it was driving me up the coast said John don't look at that don't look at that it doesn't look like that don't stop looking at that because he wanted to show me how dry the North Coast was and it was nothing but flowers that happens when it rains but when it rains it's also disastrous of course because it washes out irrigation canals it damages houses visit villages it leads to disease and famine and so on so Steve thought perhaps this human sacrifice was to try and stop the rain something like that why there were some though in the dry sand sorry was another issue Steve thought it might be something giving thanks for that we'll take a look at how this hypothesis has fared through later discoveries and I'll get to that in a minute so after Steve dug for two years here in 1996 when I was working there there was a student who was interested in trying to find a passageway from Plaza 3a back to the pyramid which is back in this area here at that time Plaza 3c which you see here now was completely filled with sand and in fact it was it even had Adobe's over the top of it which meant that it had been a it was abandoned at the time that Plaza 3a was constructed and in use so we have to consider we're dealing with two time periods here a penultimate and then a finally kind of ultimate building at the pyramid but this student very fortuitously couldn't find a doorway that found more skeletons down here and I looked at them and they had cut marks and other things that were very similar we're going to see in a minute to what we find in in all of these sacrifices and so I talked to Santiago who say to the head of the walker de la Luna project and said could I I would love to come to dig plus a3 C and I can try and get funds and I did from National Geographic and he said great let's do it so I spent two field seasons there once they gotten all the sand out Plaza 3c is a small Plaza with a little temple in the middle of it and in an area here that became known as the the area of sacrifices because back here is where we found a lot more skeletal material and what we found were things similar to Plaza 3a although there was no rocky outcrop they were surrounding these bodies were sitting in windblown sand again sometimes piled over with Adobe's here sometimes just in sand there were complete skeletons there were partial skeletons there were scattered remains and these were the different kind of categories of things we found not as many skeletons as Steve had found but a fair number so what about the people we were digging out of Plaza 3a and 3c they're very consistent and their demographic characteristics they are all of male sex where it can be determined and they are all adolescent and young adults the oldest person I could guess was perhaps in their late 30s so I've sometimes joke that warfare in the Moche world was kind of like professional basketball you have an early retirement age or boxing perhaps also perhaps a better analogy would be boxing there are no women there no children no babies it was a very select group also this group seemed to be in very good health health robust skeletons they seemed they they were all seemed to be in good physical condition and a number of them had fractures healed fractures of the skull the arms the ribs which indicated prior experience I think with violence so they make a good profile for war captives the way they were killed also was important because this corresponds very well with Moche iconography we found right away on almost all the vertebral columns slash marks across the throat multiple ones this one you see three cuts there here you see a series of cuts all over here what's really impressive about these is the number of cuts if we put a little arrow on them we find individuals with 20 or 30 cuts that we can count much more than necessary you know you can overkill is it as a kind word for this any of these cuts would have already gone through vital structures in the throat so we know that one of these cuts would have been fatal through bleeding and so on but the number of cuts suggests some type of performance clearly where people were slashing repeatedly the throats of their victims so this seems to been something done for an audience and part of the spectacle was repeatedly slashing the throats of these people a few of them also were clubbed or show signs of being hit with clubs there were some sorry this is not like change or some sometimes I hit the wrong button there are fractures of the skull and there are a few places where I can see impact fractures the Moche had two types of clubs a large double handed single headed Club and then they had a single hand Club with a star-shaped head on it and these are examples the mochi made them in metal also in stone and you can kind of imagine the points of one like this one two points hitting that skull and leaving these impact scars and something smaller like this perhaps leaving these kind of more angular impact scars as well so so we have slashing the throat we have we have clubbing also which is not usually shown in a sacrificial scene but it's certainly shown in scenes of combat what was most interesting for me though that I found in this sample were wounds that were in the process of healing at the time the person was killed on the pyramid presumably these are fractures in various states of healing and let me just point out what we see here are is a bone fracture forming a callus the callus has partly fallen away because as we took it out of the ground or there were separate pieces but this is a fracture of the forearm and its location is very diagnostic it's it's known as a peri fracture or offending fracture where you raise your arm to block a blow and in New Orleans they often call it a nightstick fracture because it's normally produced by the police department when you when you have a complaint with them if they miss your head they get your arm instead this this we found three examples of them in various states of healing and one without evidence of healing here is a fracture of the scapula you can't see as well without looking closely and on the screen it'll be difficult but there's bone take my word for it bone knitting across this this fracture scapular fractures are also rare in Falls and accidents they're more common and direct blows so you could kind of imagine a big mochi war-club hitting your shoulder blade and fracturing it but this was healing when the person died and more difficult still to see but up close it's it's clear there are small fractures and bone reaction around the nasal margins here of this skull and this one reminded me of something I see in mochi art where captives are seen being struck on the nose intentionally to make them bleed and if you smack somebody in the nose a few times you can imagine some damage you might do to the to the margins in the nose as well so that's what I think is going on there but what I think is exciting about these other fractures is that first of all there are fractures that you might expect in combat second of all they indicate that there was a good bit of time that elapsed weeks I would say absolutely it's hard to know for sure because from clinical data today we don't mainly only have data on x-rays of people's broken bones and it's kind of hard to compare these to x-rays but it implies to me that these captives were either brought from a distant location that took some time to get there and they were dragged back wounded from the battlefield or they were kept for a period of time at the ceremonial center and while they had their wounds and before they were sacrificed one of the two but it's something that's an interesting detail that we can get from bone study that you might not have seen if you didn't know that now some other interesting things this this guy was the most dramatic example I had of someone who was clearly bound with rope and you can see rope around the wrists his hands are tied behind his back they've been this has been cleaned off now but there was rope that went straight up here and then around the neck which you can see it here so he was tied much like Moche captives are shown in ceramic vessels this would be tying the hands behind and connecting to the head making it very difficult to move or or lift your head or do other things like that this observed two purposes wanted to just demonstrate this is this is great a great example if this was a forensic case and you said was this person killed while they were a captive you'd say yes because of the rope but the rope we could also use for radiocarbon dating and we did ams dates on this rope and another rope from this level and we got good dates of about AD 554 this particular time period Steve where J had tried to date bones from Plaza 3a and had bad luck the collagen was not well preserved probably because these things were left on the surface for a long period of time and they died Genesis damaged the the the collagen which is what you would date with radiocarbon dating okay so you can see the ropes there now the only things that were found with these bodies in terms of cultural artifacts in addition to the ropes were fragments of ceramic vessels there were no weapons found with them there were no clothing items no items of adornment or anything else Steve or Jay found these figures all broken the interesting thing about them is that they're seated nude figures and they're prisoners and only a few have been able they've been able to reconstruct here's the head of one these were rather large figures and intentionally smashed there were rocks around them and they were all broken into little pieces so apparently part of the ritual was to break these captives these ceramic captives now why they were unfired ceramics I don't know but that was a characteristic of them but they also show chol characteristics of captives there are the large earlobes that ear spools would have gone through and high-status people would wear wear your spools part of the stripping of the of the items from a captive was to take their ear spools and other items of adornment so this is showing a captive stripped of their signs of rank and then then they were smashed now in Plaza 3c that I excavated we found similar ceramic vessels but these were fired and they were smaller and this is one you can see fragments of there's the head of the prisoner here are the knees he's kneeling here's a more complete example with a rope around its neck these were also found broken and scattered throughout the plaza and you can and these in this case were fired ceramic vessels these things also turn up in tombs at the site of mochi and at some other mochi sites so in some art museums you'll see captive figures like this what these vessels serve what function they serve we don't know perhaps they held blood also they haven't been tested for that or were used somehow in the ritual but as part of the ritual they were broken eventually and buried with the dead now our questions of course early on were who are these captives and who are the victors who is capturing whom and can we can we identify them in some way these by the way are two pieces that came out of a tomb here is a captive that's saying a ceramic vessel part of a corn popping vessel and here's a warrior with his club and his with his shield and his club painted on here well the argument for a long time and continued and when it continues among iconographer 's is that the idea that mochi combat was strictly ritual it was some type of ritual combat between elites and between elites of the Moche Society and in even as far as saying they were all from the same site from the Moche site the arguments were based on the fact that these people are really dressed to the nines they're clearly elite warriors who could afford all the fineries including things like nose ornaments I would never fight with a nose ornament my nose I would be very distracting but there they're depicted there also with feather headdresses and crowns and so on and metal plated garments and so on and the other argument was they seem to always be in pairs and therefore this must have been some it's not a battle scene with hundreds of soldiers or scenes of storming a fort or something like that but I had my doubts because I you know we I'm not an art historian but I have enough of suspicion of iconography to know that this is highly formalized art and it is art it's there representing something they want to depict this is not a photograph so I began looking at comparative material and here's an example that actually my wife Elizabeth who's an art historian of the Aztecs brought to my attention and this is a detail from the sacrificial stone a month Exuma the first from Tennessee law in Mexico City and what it shows is a conquest scene but the interesting thing is it's a conquest of a polity the tena yuka town polity and but it's it's the god of tonight you go who's being captured by whitsel approach Lee the Aztec God but it is Montezuma dressed as Huitzilopochtli so we know enough about Aztec iconography to know that this first of all is a symbolic scene it's a conquest it doesn't show a battle doesn't show soldiers doesn't show anything about the details of it it shows the moment of conquest and it's a battle where one God is defeating another God and and yet the and of course the the iconography of it is very similar to mo J's we'll see in a minute where it's grabbing of the hair and that's all you have to say you know that's the moment of conquest the moment of victory and because we know Aztec iconography and we know more or less the history and the date we know this was an actual historic event that's being shown it's not just a symbolic statement of ritual warfare we have similar things of course and elegant things from the Maya region this is from Yaya's chill on lintel 8 in Mexico and this is a scene where bird oops sorry wrong button sorry bird Jaguar shown here is taking one of his most famous captives jeweled skull who's named here on his leg and there are glyphs that indicate the dates specific dates of the conquest who conquered whom and who is who and so on so in this case again we know that this was a historic event this was the conquest of one group by another it was not simply a symbolic ritual battle so when we look at mo ji I have I feel we have to stand back and say compare these two for a moment and you see how similar they are in terms of the depiction of conquest and these people yes in this case they're both dressed as mochi but of course in the valley of Mexico people dressed fairly similarly too although I'm sure if you were from there you would recognize immediately the different dresses of different warrior groups and different peoples but my I see this is a cautionary tale that mochi art should not be seen literally and just because there are two people one on one doesn't mean that this is not there was not real fighting and combat between groups of soldiers now the other argument for the idea that was totally ritual was that everybody seemed to be dressed as mochi and carrying mochi weapons now there's a small but growing sample of pieces like this one which is in the ethnographic Museum in Berlin and has been illustrated by many people this is here's a classic mochi warrior with his back flap and his helmet and his crescent crown and his war-club here is someone dressed quite differently in kind of a loincloth a very different kind of war club different kind of head treatment different kind of thing hanging from his shoulders and this is consistent throughout this scene it's a scene of combat between what seemed to be two quite differently dressed people now Jorge Lau who is a colleague of mine and expert on require culture believes that these are required warriors of the iconography of the club and other details for him suggest that it's the require the require were people of the northern highlands just just up the mountains from the mochi and they apparently had some periods of conflict with the Moche culture and as did other groups as is indicated by settlement studies done by Brian Pillman and others so we know there were time periods when they were there was conflict up and down valleys we also can guess that there is probably conflict between different valleys where the mochi lived there if we the mochi once we're seen as kind of a monolithic state with its capital city at the side of mochi now it's very clear from archaeology done by Jose by sari by various people who are working in in San Jose tomorrow and other sites in the hecka de pekka Valley that there were different mochi royal houses multiple ones sometimes in the same Valley and in different valleys as well so Louis Jaime Castillo was the name was trying to think of he's been he's been showing us very clearly by his work at San Jose tomorrow so I think there is some evidence that the mo J were sometimes fighting other groups and I think there's also evidence that we can't take this as literal illustration now let's get back to bones and that's where where I can argue more I think more directly there have been suggestions that mochi warfare was simply a ritual Tinku battle and I haven't used that word before but Tinku is a type of ritual battle still practiced in the in the highlands today in peru where groups will periodically get together and have fights fist fights sometimes throw stones sometimes sling stones people will get injured it's good to have some blood drawn that's supposed to fertilize the earth it's okay to have people killed every now and then but if the people are killed their bodies are returned to the family they're buried properly in a ritual fashion now the people at pyramid them at the pyramid of the moon-- I'm sorry if I keep fading out I think the microphone is coming and going these sacrificial victims never made it home they didn't go home they were not buried properly Moche funeral practices we understand very well and Chris Donnan has done a great job of showing how systematically ritualized they are from the most simple graves to the most elaborate royal tombs these are people who are in this case for example this guy was decapitated and put buried with his feet right in front of his face I think that's pretty disrespectful and this is a case where you simply have the arms and legs of a person and notice he has a healing fracture right there as well marking him as one of these people with a fracture that was still healing this is not the behavior I would expect would be proper treatment for one's elites if you were having some ceremonial battle I could see someone dying and perhaps even being sacrificed but to be treated this way also we have trophies from throughout the Moche site human skulls turned into drinking vessels or ceremonial vessels we found two of these in 1999 at huaca de la luna with holes drilled to tie the mandible to the skull you can see the top of the skull was cut open in Inca times we know that the Emperor atahuallpa had a drinking vessel made of a mummified head of one of the generals of his half-brother who he was having a civil war with and he would drink out of a golden her silver straw out of that cup to celebrate victories maybe the mochi did something like that this was found just two years ago it's the top of a skull that's been cut and then decorated with what I think are vulture heads going around the side so we have evidence of the collection and the modification of body parts in this case this skull was not a dry skull it had cut marks all over it so I know it was a defleshed fresh head that was then turned into a trophy so not something that somebody said an ancestral skull taken out of a tomb and then turned into say a relic for the household and these things were used for a while and then discarded in the refuse in the urban sector so eventually they lost their value maybe they broke or for some other reason they were simply abandoned thrown away so not what you I would do with people I had respected either finally a little more complexity in what we found in Plaza 3c here is the guy we've we've shown you with the hands tied behind the back right next to him is somebody who that the hands are not tied oh and he's looks feeling fully articulated pretty much like a skeleton that decomposed in place but if you look at look up here he's missing his entire right shoulder girdle and arm and hand they're just they're gone and believe me that was not our excavation we did this all by hand with little Texan paintbrushes so I have an excellent team and you can kind of tell they were excellent by how carefully even in loose sand they kept the hands and the feet from from being lost and this guy even is the gripping of his fingers they've got that perfectly cleaned well this puzzled me a little bit how does a complete limb come off I mean you you I can tell you can't do it that way if in a living flesh skeleton if you tie somebody to four horses you can pull the arms out of the shoulder joints but you don't pull the entire scapula and clavicle away as well so we were puzzled by that and when we looked at these things in the laboratory this skeleton shows cut marks all over the body all over the legs all up and down the vertebral column on the ribs on the scapula that is there the black bones are the ones that are missing legs arms everything just dozens and dozens of cut marks now these cut marks are very tiny and fine but here I'll just show you a detail on the femur you can see them and one of my students did her dissertation on these cut marks and they clearly were done with a metal knife something like a to me probably but why do all this cutting they're not taking the body apart and that's obvious because the body is not taken apart so this is not the dismemberment of something like an animal if you are butchering it it's the cutting off of muscles from the bone and you know your first thought might be well cannibalism but there is no evidence at this site of either any thermal damage boiling burning of bones there are no bones broken open for marrow there very these are very different from what we see in the Southwest us whether you want to call that cannibalism or not but very very different they're not treating these as they treat their faunal remains because at this site the yama bones are broken open for their marrow there they're taken apart that sections of legs are cooked separately and so on so I think they're defleshing the skeleton and it reminded me of my anatomy gross anatomy days some of the things we do I didn't do this but I knew that my cadaver on the medical table once I'd taken most of the muscle muscles off while the ligaments were still there and while it was still moist with formaldehyde and formalin and stuff I could have lifted the thing up in the air and it would have been suspended as a complete skeleton held together by the ligaments now if I hung it on a wall and let it dry gradually those ligaments would become fragile and gradually things might begin to fall off such as an entire limb or something like that so that's what I'm thinking they're doing I think they're modifying these skeletons for some purpose here's another example where when at first glance it looks like a skeleton just kind of tightly flexed in a burial but this shoulder blade should be up here that shoulder blade should be over here these things are totally out of alignment this spine is clearly broken there and this skeleton has cut marks all over it too I think it was something it was used in some kind of ritual and then when it fell apart somebody said you know Bob get rid of that thing take it out that's me another way I look at life somebody with you know one of the hoi polloi said you know get this thing out of here these things are getting or falling apart well what were they doing with these skeletons well the only iconographic link we have requires a little bit of reinterpretation perhaps of some of these scenes of dancing skeletons and we've known about these in mochi art for a long time and they've always been interpreted as the afterlife the other side of the world and that may be the case in some depictions but some of these also seem to have flayed faces where the faces have been partly cut away and this may in fact we'll have to see we have no illustrations of suspended skeletons although do we do have illustrations of arms and legs with ropes around them floating through the air and some of these scenes I think that some of these things may represent captives who have been defleshed and then perhaps hung around it at victorious events and so on okay well what about these victims who were they we have these ceramic vessels which seem to be kind of generic captives although there are some that Kristen and thinks might be identifiable because they match some of the they're they're similar to some of the portrait head bottles well for years people have said well why don't you just do the DNA and figure out if they're local or not and I don't do DNA and but I had my doubts about how useful it might be assuming Shimada and archaeologists and ken'ichi Shinoda who is a geneticist from japan began doing mitochondrial DNA studies first at at mochi sites Lexy pond and then a secon is a later alumni icky culture and they took some samples from huaca de la luna and including both sacrifices and people buried at the site their preliminary results found very little genetic difference between their captives or the executed people the sacrifices and the local people the problem is that the samples were very small and as they extended their universe to the South all the way to the Sante Valley which is quite a few valleys to the south those people had very similar mitochondrial DNA and talking to some of my colleagues would do DNA they said well that's not really surprising there may not have been that much by deconned really Asian and as many of you know mitochondrial DNA has only passed on through the maternal line your mother to her children and daughters to their children and so on so it doesn't represent the whole gene pool but it represents something you can trace the female lineage so a colleague of mine Rick Sutter and Rosa Rosa Cortez decided to try something different they took dental morphological traits these are minor variations in cusps and roots and did bio distant studies this is a reproach seaford for nuclear DNA because it's reflecting both father and mother in it and I did one with Rick Sutter on Plaza 3c in particular a couple years later Rick did all the work on it I got credit just because I gave him the teeth and and I agreed with his results so we you know he really did the work on it and let me show you what his his data showed graphically which which makes it a little easier to see he did both a cluster diagram comparing the sacrificial victims to people from waka de la Luna platform from piccata namu another site in the Hecky de pekka Valley walked into Luna the urban sector and then three samples from Sara oreja another site in the Moche Valley and from different time periods there and I think you can see the group that pulls off most distinctive from all are the sacrifices from Plaza 3a and 3c a different way to represent it is multi-dimensional scaling using a generalized distance and here again they pull apart as a you or a distinctive group and I tend to believe this one and and I think it you know although those who are in the other camp and don't don't want these people to be Outsiders might argue that well we don't really I don't know if I believe in teeth but I think this is is pretty at least for me pretty convincing evidence and the DNA evidence is still somewhat ambiguous its it's not as clear as they would like it to be finally a new technique that's being used by one of my recent PhDs Marla Coyne who is now at the University of Central Florida is to use oxygen stabilisation isotopes these reflect the water that you drink and they vary by temperature altitude and other things and just to simplify these what she found is some evidence that some of these people are outliers this is plaza 3a this is material from their teeth which represents their childhood the water they were drinking when they were children and you see they're much broader spread than this the mean and standard deviation that one on each side that's what the these red boxes indicate the the local signature of the people buried at this site some of the other things are overlapping a lot a few other things are falling out this is still a work in progress but it's it's beginning the issues that we really have is how different is the water in different river valleys adjacent to one another so if I was fighting my neighbors in the next Valley north would the oxygen isotopes be different enough in the water they drink to show that they capped as I brought back were not from my people so it's it's a tough game to play sometimes but I think the archaeological evidence at least for me is it strongly weighted towards the idea that these are captives brought back killed and not given proper burial they were either incorporated sorry they were either incorporated in the floor as they built this plaza this is plaza 3c and then there were more put on top of the floor when the floor was put on which i think is a very strong symbolic message they're incorporating the victims of sacrifice into their own ceremonial building and we have some other evidence of that from other sites as well as I said earlier the evidence for flooding and for direct association with El Nino other than Plaza 3a we haven't seen it at Plaza 3c we don't find any evidence of heavy rainfall or any association so Plaza 3a may represent a response to crisis and if there was an El Nino that would be a time of political unrest hunger conflict between groups competing over limited resources so perhaps so in that case now let me wrap up with with the latest findings and that is from this area here the what's called the new temple now or platform 3 what's really interesting is that just last summer Santiago would say to determined that the waka de Luna there was a doorway here not shown in this illustration it was found later and another doorway down here the doorways were sealed at a certain point around 8800 and the complex was abandoned huaca de la luna was abandoned and instead this new temple was constructed and this that's why they call it the new temple and now they call this the old temple and only in the last couple years of excavations been done here this is last summer as I was touring it and I was about to begin excavating right here this is the new temple and my phase 2 finial spent two years excavating here and and they've done beautiful work with digging it if you know mochi this is the temple associated with the revolt of the artifacts a famous mural that is now destroyed by weathering and so on but a lot has been written about that here is a reconstruction of this new temple what's important about it is what's shown on the walls here are captives nude captives running along there are scenes of warriors there's the same kind of iconography here is a nude captive here you can't see very well but those are legs and that's a back flap that's a warrior here's a war club so in this very late period and now we have radiocarbon dates from this this is AD 800 to 900 the very last construction at a pyramid of pyramids of mochi and what's been found that's interesting is of course more skeletal material which I was very happy about so I've been going down to to help analyze this and excavate some of this summer is past summer and so they found more skeletal material there's more say Stephanie Oh who's directing it these are students from the university of trujillo who were doing their field practice out there what Tofino found was similar patterns to what we find in three a and three c partial bodies slash throats you can see cut marks on the throat cut marks on the feet these are this is from an isolated foot and now we know definitely they cut that foot off of someone it was part of an articulated foot and some other things that seemed to be modified beginnings of modifying skulls this is a skullcap it's a great photograph that Moises took and I just love it because it looks like a golf ball ready to be teed off or something but super close-up of a skull that's been battered all the way around there cut marks on it too it had been defleshed and they were breaking the top of the skull off perhaps to make a vessel of some type now just last fall archaeologists were clearing this area trying to define the ramp that leads up to this platform and they found a scattering of human bones and and very nicely for me Santiago told them to just cover them up with plastic and sand leave them for me so I went last summer with some students from Tulane and we went up went there and and uncovered all of the the things that had been found documented those took them back to the lab and studied them and then took the rest of the deposit down back in the lab we studied all this material just to see what it was and we could determine that this wasn't simply disturbed burials or something out of context what we found again were the signatures of sacrifice cut marks on the throat here are some cut marks on the zygomatic process of the temporal bone three cuts here from defleshing or or somehow lowers playing the face so the same types of signatures so what's important about this new discovery well these things date as I said to the very last gasp of mochi culture around 80 the late eight hundreds and throughout the North Coast mochi sites are abandoned mochi art is not produced anymore architecture changes there's an intermediate period with styles that are not mochi anymore there's something else they're partly mochi they're evolving into other things for some reason mochi society unraveled but what's important to me is that up until the last moment they were sacrificing it seems anyway sacrificing captives trying to perhaps maintain their hegemony or their their their whatever it is their self-concept in doing this and it reminds me that you know in underlines affected for me sacrifice was a key element of ritual practices at the huaca de la luna not just a response to an occasional flood or other natural disaster so excavations continued at the site they now have a beautiful site Museum so if you can get to Peru go there it's one of the most amazing sights on in Peru today and it's a site that's been dug continuously for fifteen years and they're continuing to get funding this is one of these great examples of a Peruvian funded project that is now supported by a beer company by by a variety of things federal funds that what it means is their parties are great because you have unlimited beer Pilsen through here is the beer they serve until you can't stand to drink it anymore and in my case that's definitely true after about three bottles big bottles of that I think thank you I've had enough but anyway this excavation continues there are some areas around that that platform that have still not been excavated and there may be some more skeletons waiting there for me I will work for others and so the story is not over yet but I will that's kind of an overview of where we are today and I'll stop there thanks for your attention and I hope I didn't hope I didn't talk too long but I'll be happy to take take questions from anybody and their microphones I guess so you guys encourage speaking into the microphone yes oh I can hear you if you can speak loud I think that'll be fine by relation between the matter and the sort of sacrifice what was their different got more uh yes well when I talk about and that's that's my problem in using the term of human sacrifice and sometimes I think I'd just stop using it I should just call it execution of prisoners because that's really what they're doing but they're also manipulating them in very complex ways and they're doing it in their their ceremonial center so they're not doing it out in the battlefield or or out somewhere and they're not disposing of the bodies behind in the trash heaps as as is done in some cultures where they kill captives the the thing that the thing the differences that I find are in Plaza 3a almost no one was defleshed and I don't know why I have one skeleton that had it Plaza 3c they were doing a lot of defleshing and it may be the difference also at Plaza 3c seemed to be a final repository for the leftovers of these sacrificial rituals so it was like they were it's like that was the room where they put them when they were done with them Plaza 3a has more of the appearance of people being killed and just thrown down either thrown off the rock outcrop itself or off the platform next to it and there is some evidence of manipulation of those bodies as they decompose because we don't find any cut marks but we find a lot of missing legs and disarticulated things vultures may have played a part in that black vultures are all over that area today and in Moche art they even show them in some scenes pecking at bodies and vultures can drag bones the problem is that vultures their beaks usually don't leave marks that we can identify there's a forensic one of the body new body farms Texas State San Marcos where they're now doing vulture experiments to see how it affects donated bodies and they find that vultures can pick bodies clean really fast they leave some scratch marks but what I wonder is how much of it is just trampling if you have a if you have cultures pulling and yanking things over sand you're going to get some scratches I don't think their beaks are strong enough to leave marks but in terms of cut marks and other things this type of sacrifice that I'm showing is quite different from some of the other things emoji I did they also had retainer burials the they put in the tombs of elites those they would strangle and we even have some with ropes that are still around the neck and that seemed to be a more gentle bloodless way to to kill someone you wanted to go into the afterlife with with their you know husband ruler or whatever whoever it was and they didn't have any cut marks in those cases they never slit the throats of people they put in tombs so there are there is some difference in terms of the way they killed people and these captives were always their throats were slit and the collection of blood seems to have been a really important thing so I don't know if that totally answers your question but yes there has been some fecal matter and feathers found in Plaza 3a so we have what we don't find which is interesting is there's almost no carnivore damage at all one of my other students that our dissertation on the taphonomy of these sites and could you find carnivore damage could you find human you know what was causing the disarticulation was it human activity was it animals so dogs didn't get in there and we know the Moche had dogs and if I was a dog I'd hop over the wall if I could I have a dog and I've had two deflesh some forensic cases in my backyard and the dogs really want to get at him so dogs if they could have gotten in I'm sure it would it and foxes and other things but vultures don't you know they don't seem to left a good trace but I have a feeling they were there were there yes right I think I think it's a good analogy to what is happening in Nazca - and I those heads I strongly believe are also trophies not revered ancestors the way they're shown they make good trophies and then those mochi skulls were the first modified skulls I'd ever seen from mochi context they're different in their form you know they're kind of like bowls and maybe they had a gourd bowl or something inside the cranium that held liquid or something like that but we'll have to see if we find some more complete examples but it is a similar pattern I think more yes and that's a very good point and I didn't mention numbers and numbers of centuries if we add up all the skeletons we have now from mochi we have less than 200 and we have from radiocarbon dates it was going on from 8200 to AD almost 900 so many centuries and so I have a feeling it was just a few people perhaps from each conquest so not an entire polity and certainly they weren't Center they weren't killing women and children so you're right there's there not a lot of them there it's nothing like although debates will go on forever about say the temple of my or in Mexico City where they where the Spanish or some of the natives claimed that 10,000 people were sacrificed to dedicate the temple and there are very few skeletons that have been found but of course they were probably dispersed and if they were on the surface they probably eroded through the years and they may be somewhere else and of course you couldn't leave all those people at your temple it would be just a gigantic pile of bodies but the Moche we can't compete with the Aztecs which is a shame because my wife's an Aztec specialist not so I they always come off being a little bit more efficient and they're the numbers of people they killed but you're you're right they didn't kill everybody and you're right also it would not be a efficient way to you know kill a lot of potentially productive slaves or others who could you know if you took everybody out of a territory and you didn't have enough farmers to put back into that that those lands would go fallow and you wouldn't be able to draw on them so I think these probably were select people the other thing and that is an interesting point that I think about sometimes warfare has changed a lot and I remember in World War one I wasn't there but I heard that if you were a general in World War one and say the German army or the French army or the US Army and you were captured you would be treated like royalty they'd put you in a castle they'd feed you well you'd socialize with your fellow officers whereas the common soldier would be put in put in a fenced yard or shot or or something else and one thing that we don't have from these mochi sites is any older adult men so we we could imagine if someone conquered the leader of a certain group not everybody who is a leader would be 20 25 30 years old so either either the leaders were treated differently and not killed maybe just some of the common soldiers were collected and killed or else the leaders were treated in a different way or killed elsewhere so that's a good point I'd like to find some older individuals I have excavated a sacrifice aiight done by the chimú and there we find men in their 60s and boys as young as six years old and there it seems like they gathered together a group and this was a reprisal killing I think and they just took them to a beach and slit their throats and left them there so in that case a very different profile and those people were not soldiers I don't think they were just innocents who perhaps rebelled against a conquest and they were as an example all killed so that one in some ways even more brutal than the Moche launched a case other questions yes you why would they bother well that's a good question um there were many things that were done in the Andes that we wouldn't take time to do these days I'll just give you one example although this was a punitive example one of my favorite stories about how to walpa was when he was captured by the Spanish at cajamarca he had this beautiful cape that was the softest wool that anyone had ever felt he said you know what it's made of it's made of vampire bat wool and I make the people in tune based my subjects because they're lazy I make them make me a tunic out of out of vampire bat wool so he put you know hundreds of people to tremendous tasks just to make himself happy and to teach them a lesson now in the case of the Moche I do feel that on a more serious note the the pyramid itself for me is is a great symbol of power of that particular place when you see that North facade and that front Plaza could hold hundreds and hundreds of people on a grand scale they were advertising their power over captives that they were bringing and sacrificing and and it I don't know who the people were who would do the actual defleshing or even the killing perhaps they were priests perhaps they were orderlies something like that there you know there were large numbers of people who lived there and there were certainly it was a highly hierarchical Society so there were a lot of people you could dedicate to that the same as you would have build the pyramid tremendous amount of work to build the Pyramid of the Sun to make those millions of bricks and put them all up there so so I guess I can see that kind of thing and also I think you know if you want to make a statement of power if you have your enemies hanging from the posts and you know that's not a foreign concept for Europeans hanging the heads of putting people on poles or hanging them outside the entrance to the city traitors and thieves and so on or crucifixion and the Roman Empire those were powerful statements of the power of the state over people who were threatening it so so I you know it was a lot of work I wouldn't want to but there many other things I wouldn't really want to do either like TA in classes I'm sorry that's why I became a bodyguard and didn't want a mimeograph I went to school back in the days that most of you don't know what a mimeograph machine was but that's what we had to do in the good old days and I like the smell of it but I didn't like doing it any any other sacrificial questions we're getting close to the hors d'oeuvres the reception so I don't know what you're going to have finger food oh sorry