Archaeologists study and compare styles and themes depicted in moche art for clues about lifestyle belief and cultural variation among these ancient people.
Ceramic moche vessel.
During peru s long history many civilizations have flourished and subsequently disappeared.
Reddish brown ceramic open top portrait vessel of a man wearing ear spools and a headdress with a puma head motif and two enormous front paws emerging from the sides.
Photo by nathan benn wagner edu.
One particularly famous moche portrait vessel is known as the huaco retrato mochica.
Among these are the chavin paracas nasca moche huari chimĂș and inca.
Moche skilled ceramists produced a great variety of exquisitely decorated vessels.
Many of these cultures had highly complex stratified societies.
Mochica style this modelled ceramic shows a priest or shaman engaged in a curing ritual or praying over a deceased person.
The decoration is sometimes painted on the smooth surface of vessels 67 167 4.
For many years the foundation of moche chronology was a five phase ceramic temporal seriation of moche style vessels established by larco hoyle 1946 1948.
The portrait was made during the late moche period ca.
Moche ceramic pot vessel in the form of a recumbent anthropomorphic peasant playing the quena an andean flute.
Moche is fairly well defined temporally although its origins are less clear than its demise.
600 ce according to the chronology made by rafael larco hoyle in 1948.
Peru moche portrait vessel of lord with a puma headdress.
These phases were verified by archeological strata.
Other times it is tridimensional forming the vessel shape itself 82 1 30.
Moche vessels are especially well known for their unique stirrup shaped spouts and representational art style depicting humans animals and activities of social and spiritual significance.
Of the thousands of ceramic vessels that have been recovered at least 500 of them display sexually explicit imagery typically rendered as free standing three dimensional figures on top or as part of the vessel.
The ceramic portrait is also an example of a stirrup spout vessel of a moche ruler.