This fascinating podcast starts with the fact that we all know the Aztecs and Incas, ‘cause they interacted with the Spanish during the Age of Exploration; we’ve even found about the Olmecs and Mayans, most of us. But nobody knows about the Moches, the civilization that had a big kingdom in pre-Incan Peru, about 200 BC to 600 AD. This little Moche warrior, like all things made by ancient cultures, is really a pot; it was found in a burial site, with lots of similar pots, and is really all anybody knows about the Moches. Their warriors apparently liked to bash people over the head with clubs. The pot is a complicated object, being hollow, and would have required several molds, painters, and skilled artisans to construct.
MacGregor has some evidence (he doesn’t name his source on this) that much Moche warplay was in the form of duelling, and whoever lost would then be sacrificed. He had a horrific list of the stuff they did to people when they sacrificed them, provided by a French archeologist who had uncovered a site where 70 or so men were gutted, drawn and quartered, beheaded, etc., and then the victor drank the blood of his vanquished enemy, perhaps from one of these pots. I wasn’t clear where he was getting all this information, but I suppose it’s consistent with what I’ve heard about the Mayans and the Aztecs...not to absolve how those civilizations were systematically eradicated by the Europeans, but that they were pretty nasty (though perhaps less imperialistic) groups themselves.
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