AIA Archaeology Hour | Cuisine and Crisis

Yesterday — November 15, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. — I watched the webinar Cuisine and Crisis: An Edible History of the Moche of Ancient Peru presented by Dr. Katherine L. Choiu, a bioarchaeologist from the Ancient People and Plants lab at the University of Alabama, and hosted by the Tallahassee Society branch of the Archaeological Institute of America. The talk focused on Moche society, which existed in the Jequetepeque Valley on the Peruvian coastal desert between the Pacific Ocean and Andes mountains from AD 100 to 800, about the same time as the Classic Maya.

Dr. Chiou described how her excavations of Moche sites have revealed the differences in diet between the elite and common people. She believed that study diet is an important but sometimes overlook facet of archaeology, as “food can tell us about where we’ve been and who we are as people”, and differences in diet are “lines drawn between status groups reinforced in daily life”. The elites lived at a site now known as San José de Moro, which was ruled by the Lord of Sipán. At this site are several huacas or sacred mounds, where bodies were carried from far away to be buried. The Priestess of Moro presided over religious ceremonies, including sacrifices. On this site, archaeologists excavated Capa de Fiesta, or the Party Layer, so called by the presence of “large capacity vessels and signs of intense cooking activities”, along with human burials and paleofeces. Unlike the separated spaces in many modern homes, the residents of Moche cooked, buried the dead, and pooped in the same place.

Up the mountainside was the settlement of Cerro Chepén, where common people lived close together in multileveled homes. Food activities clustered around specific areas of the home. One excavated house include an area for llama dung mixed with plant and animal remains, which allowed people to turn waste into fertilizer. Dr. Chiou speculated that these residents had “heightened anxiety” about food insecurity, and their diets greatly differed from those in wealthy San José de Moro. While the elites at a wide range of shellfish, including clam, crab, snails, mussels, and sea urchins, the common people ate only land snails that lived on the hills near their home. For plants, all people ate legumes and corn, while the elites also had peppers and guava, along with psychoactive plants such as cactus with mescaline, coca, and mysterious ulluchu fruit. They made and drank chicha, a type of ancient beer. Guinea pigs were a common source of protein.

During the Q&A following the main talk, Dr. Chiou expertly answered a range of questions about Moche ceremonial practices, including offerings and human sacrifices. She also described the mystery of the ulluchu fruit, which appears at archeological sites and in paintings but has not been associated with a modern fruit. Overall, this was a research focused, evenly paced talk with a good balance of photographs, illustrations, and diagrams. I enjoyed learning about a culture that I had not heard about before, and I look forward to the next AIA Archaeology Hour.

Watch the full talk here: