Vessels decorated with religious themes were not merely indicators of social status at the site of Moche. They were strategically used at a household level, as tools to further political ambitions and communicate membership within groups.

This ease of identification is no doubt because, in a culture without writing, designs on pottery vessels were an important means of communicating shared ideas and religious practices. Not simply for everyday use, then, the Nazca created vessels for ritual use, burial offerings, and pure decoration.

The Moche produced large amounts of pottery aided by the use of molds to create large quantities of specific shapes. Their color pallet was mostly limited to red, black and white. They used anthropomorphic figures and animal faces and bodies to shape their ceramic.

Until the 1980s the culture’s best-known remains were those of Moche itself, near Trujillo in the Moche River valley. Two giant structures, known as the Temple of the Sun (Huaca del Sol) and the Temple of the Moon (Huaca de la Luna), dominate the site, though there is no evidence that they were ever so dedicated.

A striking piece of Stone Age Art. In prehistoric art, the term “Jomon” (which means “cord pattern” in Japanese) refers to the ancient pottery produced by Japan’s first Stone Age culture, during the period 14,500 and 1000 BCE.

While most Moche portrait vessels feature heads, some portray full human figures. In some rare instances, young boys are represented, but no portrait vessels of adult women have yet been found. The portraits are not idealized, some feature abnormalities, such as harelips and missing eyes.

Several dozen still function today. The Nazca Province in the Ica Region was named for this people.

The Nazca Lines /ˈnæzkɑː/ are a group of very large geoglyphs made in the soil of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. They were created between 500 BC and AD 500 by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving differently colored dirt exposed.

The coil method most likely involved the formation of clay into long coiled pieces that were wound into a vessel. The coils were then smoothed together to create walls. Like the Ancient Greeks, the Maya created clay slips from a mixture of clays and minerals. The clay slips were then used to decorate the pottery.

A civilization in the northern Andean highlands of Peru from 900-250 BCE, known for their construction of temples and their advancements in engineering and metallurgy.

The significance of Chavín is that for the first time many of the local or regional cultures of the area were unified by a common ideology or religion. The extent of political unification remains uncertain.

Many vessels, then, are plain, but around half have decoration of some kind, most typically lines and waves made by impressing a cord onto the wet clay before firing, hence the name jomon or ‘cord pattern’ for the pottery and time period of this era of Japanese history.

Recent excavations in residential areas, notably in the Moche and Santa Valleys in projects carried out by Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and Université de Montréal, revealed that finely decorated pottery is not only present but abundant in Moche domestic compounds. Many decorated vessels were not produced exclusively for a funerary purpose.

They elaborated new technologies in metallurgy, pottery, and textile production, and finally, they created an elaborate ideological system and a complex religious iconography. Moche skilled ceramists produced a great variety of exquisitely decorated vessels.

Common zoomorphic figures include camelids, deer, felines, foxes, rodents, monkeys, bats, sea lions, as well as a wide array of birds, fish, shells, arachnids, and reptiles. These animals are represented realistically, hybridized, or anthropomorphized ( 82.1.29 ). Corn, squash, tubers, and beans are common among a great diversity of plants.

Moche society flourished on the north Peruvian coastal desert between the first and the eighth centuries A.D., in valleys irrigated by rivers flowing westward from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean. The Moche were innovators on many political, ideological, and artistic levels.