Burial of the Lady of Cao at El Brujo

El Brujo, a ceremonial complex on the right bank of the Chicama river north of Trujillo, has three great mounds; the largest, Huaca Cao Viejo, is a stepped Moche pyramid famous for its painted reliefs, among them a procession of naked captives led by a warrior. In 2005 archaeologists led by Régulo Franco Jordán, working with the Augusto N. Wiese Foundation, found her intact tomb there. The funerary bundle — of 22 layers of cloth, according to the site’s museum — held the mummified body of a young woman, in her mid-twenties by most estimates, who may have died from complications of pregnancy or childbirth; a second young woman, perhaps a sacrifice, was buried with her. The English and Spanish Wikipedias give 2006 as the year of the discovery.

Her arms, hands and feet are tattooed with snakes, spiders and other animals. The bundle contained crowns and diadems of gilded copper, nose ornaments and ear spools, necklaces of gold, silver and semi-precious stones, and weapons, among them clubs. Until then it was believed that only men held high rank in Moche society; the richness of the burial and the weapons suggest that she was a high priestess or even a ruler, perhaps of the Chicama valley, and the English article on El Brujo calls her remains the earliest evidence of a female ruler in Peru. The discovery is often compared with that of the Lord of Sipán.

Her date is given differently: about 450 in the English Wikipedia, about 400 in the Spanish, and about 500 on the site museum’s website. The body, preserved in part thanks to a coating of cinnabar (mercury sulphide), is displayed in the Museo Cao at El Brujo, and in July 2017 a reconstruction of her face, made with 3D imaging of the skull, was unveiled at Peru’s Ministry of Culture.