Middle Sicán: the Lambayeque culture at its height at Batán Grande

The archaeologist Izumi Shimada named the culture Sicán — ‘temple of the Moon’, in his interpretation — and divides it into Early (about 750–900), Middle (900–1100) and Late (1100–1375) phases; it is also called the Lambayeque culture, and how far it continued the Moche is debated. In the Middle phase, after the decline of the Wari state and of the Cajamarca polity, a new religious state arose in the Lambayeque region. Its art is dominated by a single figure, the ‘Sicán Deity’, with a mask-like face and upturned eyes, sometimes with the features of a bird; human figures are rare, the exception being the ‘Sicán Lord’ with his retinue, probably the deity’s earthly counterpart. In the 16th century the Spanish chronicler Miguel Cabello Valboa recorded the legend of Naylamp, who came by sea on a balsa raft and founded the first dynasty of the Lambayeque valleys.

The religious capital, the Sicán Precinct, was a T-shaped group of monumental adobe mounds — Huaca Loro, El Moscón, Las Ventanas, La Merced, Abejas — built between about 900 and 1050 by filling walled chambers with refuse; marks on the adobe bricks are taken to show which patrons supplied materials and labour. The elite were buried in deep shaft tombs beneath the mounds. The East Tomb at Huaca Loro, excavated by Shimada’s project, held over a ton of grave goods, more than two-thirds of them objects of arsenical bronze, tumbaga and gold and silver alloys, and its principal personage wore a mask in the likeness of the Sicán Deity; the women buried in the West Tomb seem to have been grouped by their kinship to that tomb’s principal personage and to each other, as mitochondrial DNA and dental studies suggest.

Metallurgy was the greatest achievement of the Middle Sicán. Workshops such as Huaca Sialupe fired their kilns with charcoal from local hardwoods, and smiths produced arsenical copper — more ductile and more resistant to corrosion than pure copper — on a large scale, as well as gold and silver beakers, masks and ceremonial tumi knives; metals marked rank, from high-karat gold for the highest elite to arsenical copper for commoners. Around 1020 a drought lasting some thirty years struck the region; between 1050 and 1100 the temples of the Sicán Precinct were burned and abandoned, perhaps in a revolt against the elite, and floods around 1100 completed the ruin. The Late Sicán capital moved to Túcume, and about 1375 the region fell to the Chimú.