Emergence of the Moche culture

The Moche succeeded the Salinar culture, which some scholars see as a short transition between the Cupisnique and the Moche, and flourished from about AD 100 to 800 (the Russian article: from the 1st to the 8th century) along some 400 km of desert coast in the modern regions of La Libertad and Lambayeque. Their southern capital near present-day Moche and Trujillo was dominated by the Huaca del Sol, the largest pre-Columbian structure in Peru, and the Huaca de la Luna.

The Moche built networks of irrigation canals, some of which still work, and were masters of metalworking, including gilding and electrochemical plating; their painted ceramics show portraits and scenes of ritual and daily life. The intact tomb of the Lord of Sipán, found in 1987, dates from about AD 300. Climatic disasters in 563–594, possibly a super El Niño, brought some thirty years of heavy rain and floods followed by thirty years of drought, and in the 7th–8th centuries the Moche culture came to an end; the sources date its final decline differently. The date of its emergence is approximate.