Sicán gold

I thought I'd better catch the Richesses du Pérou exhibition in Gatineau before it finishes at the end of this month; that's where I spent the morning.

The treasures unearthed near Ferreñafe, dating from what we call the Middle Ages, have nothing to do with the Inca civilisation; the Incas came later. Let's get this straight: the Sicán were descendants of the Moche whose God (Ai Apaec) was feline and had fangs. After the disappearance of the Sicán, their contemporaries, the Chimú people, came to prominence, then the Incas, their Emperor captured in 1532 by the Spanish. (Spanish Peru didn't become a republic until 1824.)

Archeologists are still busy finding out about the Sicán people; there is doubtless more to be found. Izumi Shimada, the man in charge of the excavations at Huaca Loro, who originally assumed it would take fifteen years to explore the site, now believes it will be a lifetime's project.

Huaca Loro is one of the strange 35m high stone bumps that decorate the plain between the La Leche and Lambayeque Rivers that flow from the Andes to the Pacific coast. Looking at the photos before reading about them, I assumed that these outcrops were natural, like Ayers Rock in the Australian outback, but no, they are the weather-beaten remains of pyramids, and buried within them were the remains of the Sicán nobility and their treasures. Perhaps there are still more to be discovered, but because huaqueros or grave robbers have also been on the lookout for these riches, digging a hundred-thousand pits over the centuries, much has gone missing.

In the East Tomb at Huaca Loro, 11m below the surface, the legitimate archeologists found the skeleton and decapitated skull of a gold-masked "lord" (as they called him) buried in a sitting position, upside down. His mask—with its ear spools, dangling nose-pendant and amber eyes—is the right way up, which makes it all the weirder. Above the mask is the snout of a golden bat whose protruding tongue could move from side to side. The eyes, with their emerald pupils (the emeralds transported from the distant land that is now Columbia) could rotate in their sockets. The arched headdress worn above the bat, which would have added 40cm to the height of the man who wore it, was made from a single thin strip of gold nearly two metres long, edged with gold feathers that would quiver in the air like real feathers as the wearer moved, as would the twenty-nine gold disks suspended in the centre of the headdress. Other finds were strings of bell-like ornaments and rattles that could be shaken, so presumably the Sicán people liked that sound.

Apart from the man's bones in the tomb were the remains of two children and two women, one of them lying on her back with legs open as if to give birth (rebirth?), the other sitting at her feet like a midwife. Perhaps they were the bones of sacrificial victims; who knows? They were almost certainly meant to be symbolic as was the red cinnabar dust brought from 900 km away that coated these bodies, representing the mother's blood, perhaps. The Sicán people had not invented writing, although they could draw (geometric patterns, birds, fish, ocean waves, the moon—Sicán means "Temple of the Moon", apparently, although how the archeologists worked that out I have no idea) and their craftsmanship was superb. The East Tomb is crammed with metal artifacts: cones, discs and the polished gold spools each as heavy as an apple, decorated with delicate whorls and retroussé markings, which they stuffed into their pierced ear lobes. Literally tons of beads and precious stones lay around the bodies in heaps as well as the pair of golden gloves shown in the picture above. Beneath the man's body lay the remains of a cloth onto which small squares of gold foil had been sewn like a mosaic of sequins. In order to make them the Sicán metallurgists must have pounded annealed ingots of gold with their hammers in a very determined manner, for the gold leaf was in places less than a millimetre thick.

Thin necked, decorated pots were found as well, the potters having left them to dry in the sun and burnished them with smooth pebbles before they were fired, the furnace de-oxygenated at a certain stage in the process so that the clay turned black. And golden crowns. Also heaps of red shells, identified as thorny oyster shells from far away Ecuador. They made necklaces out of that material, too.

Around the mysterious pyramids, their treasures hidden from sight or permanently removed,

... Nothing beside remains.

Makes one think, doesn't it?