This handsome and imposing volume, Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru, seems destined to become a mainstay of every art historian and archaeologist’s library. From its arresting cover detail of a beetle-browed portrait head vessel—refreshingly not overrestored—to its international array of authors and brilliant images of the exciting discoveries from the past decade, this book presents new material for scholars in both fields to ponder. Color photographs, each one a work of art in itself, nicely accompany the beginning of each essay. Black-and-white illustrations and line drawings, 310 in all, superbly document the text itself.

Form aside, the volume’s content more than satisfies. The project began in 1999 as a two-day symposium, “Moche: Art and Political Representation in Ancient Peru,” held at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. The symposium organizer and book editor, Joanne Pillsbury, spearheaded this timely interchange between art historians and archaeologists so crucial to promoting genuine progress in both fields. The topic, as she states in the introduction, addresses “the relationship between Moche visual imagery and what we tend to think of as ‘objective’ knowledge gained from the archaeological record” (9). That “objective” information so often, at least from the point of view of an art historian, threatens to remain lifeless and adrift from the people, aesthetics, goals, and politics of its time; in this book, however, that frustrating situation has been sidestepped with alacrity. It is that dynamic interface of art and politics that concerns the renowned, multinational cast of authors included in Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru. Essays were written by, in alphabetical order, Walter Alva, Garth Bawden, Steve Bourget, Jesus Briceño Rosario, Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, Claude Chapdelaine, Alana Cordy-Collins, Tom Dillehay, Christopher Donnan, César Gálvez Mora, Margaret Jackson, Julie Jones, Joanne Pillsbury, Jeffrey Quilter, Glenn Russell, Izumi Shimada, Santiago Uceda Castillo, and John Verano. A wide range of projects, conducted through the very productive decade of the 1990s, update us first on the incredible recent archaeological finds and add interpretations from many archaeological and art-historical perspectives of the Moche culture (A.D. 100–800).

The Huaca de la Luna at Moche—now revealed by Uceda Castillo’s important new reconstructions—emerges in greater beauty and intriguing complexity, as well as with a longer time span, than ever before. It can be understood in its broader context as well, with the familiar Pañamarca and now Huaca Cao Viejo wall imagery underscoring the pervasive yet varied themes of sacrifice, narrative presentation, and public spectacle. This important topic is highlighted by Quilter in his thoughtful essay on the Moche mimetic conception of public art, an approach he successfully shows as distinctive in the overall trajectory of Andean art. Quilter delineates carefully how the Moche both fit and do not fit into the Andean tradition, as well as how political and aesthetic strategies necessarily dovetail in antiquity, especially in the key figures of priests. Chapdelaine, in turn, highlights new data on households, burials, and the status distinctions they manifest in the city of Moche itself, where we formerly thought there was just sand blowing between the Sol and the Luna! An aboveground woman’s tomb, a robust warrior’s skeleton—even people suspected to have been ceramicists—now paint a distinctly different picture of life at this bustling center.

Bourget then admirably nuances Moche sacrificial practices, especially the extensive ones found at the Huaca de la Luna in 1995, where more than seventy individuals were sacrificed and exposed. New concrete details are revealed, such as his and Jackson’s discovery of human blood traces in ceramic goblets of the shape depicted in the famous Sacrifice Ceremony painted illustrations. (Bourget’s work led the Michael C. Carlos Museum to test for blood residue in a Chavín-revival vessel; because this piece did not have blood, it supports his hypothesis that a specific type of offering goblet was used.) He also offers the gory detail that images of flies painted on the necks of certain portrait head vessels may well indicate the victims’ exposure to the elements. Verano’s essay on osteological evidence then provides perhaps more than one might want to know (!) about the throat slitting, head bashing, and leg breaking of the Huaca de la Luna sacrifices. Yet he rightly cautions the field to weigh carefully iconographic and physical evidence and to not jump to conclusions about ritual versus “real” warfare scenarios as of yet.

The theme of real Moche people with reconstructible life histories gets another boost with Donnan’s elegant article on the portrait heads. Great strides have been made by the discovery of the same individuals depicted over time and across space: the Moche present men as they age, even as they lose face and become those Huaca de la Luna victims. Both full-figure and head “shot” memorials were made of the same men, whose scarred lips, jutting noses, and other distinctive physiognomies served Donnan well in navigating anew the many images of the magnificent Moche ceramic corpus.

Three sites also come to the fore in new ways: Huaca Cao Viejo, with its stunning reliefs, receives a very clear and informative treatment by Gálvez Mora and Briceño Rosario; Cerro Mayal appears as a vibrant ceramic workshop that primarily made serving vessels for the leaders of Mocollope in Russell and Jackson’s article; and a range of late Moche workshops for shell, cotton, metal, and clay production at Pampa Grande are illuminated by Shimada. Like the facts now known about the sacrificial victims, fascinating specificity is also achieved in these art-making studies. The creative process is glimpsed in abundant appliqué molds, the interconnected rooms of a copper workshop, and the drums whose rhythms may have accompanied the cleaning and carding of cotton.

Art itself, especially metalwork from the many Moche burials, logically receives attention in subsequent essays. Terrific overviews (soon to be assigned in pre-Columbian courses all over the world, I am sure) are presented by Jones and Alva of the relentlessly creative Moche metalsmiths and the endlessly rich burials at Sipán. New pieces from Tombs 5–12 give us much more information about the slightly lower ranks of Moche nobility, including women, retainers, priests, and warriors. The use of copper is better represented than in previous research, demonstrating how messages about art and power attain more and more subtle gradations as the archaeological and artistic information piles up.

Geographic, temporal, and gender distinctions are highlighted in the last essays. Cordy-Collins’s valuable contribution analyzes a series of ceramic images of foreign women wearing a distinctive northerly labret. Spanish documentation neatly supports her argument that powerful, cloaked women were a force to be reckoned with for many centuries on the North Coast. Along with San José de Moro, where such female figures clustered, an enormous number of Moche sites have recently been found in the northern sphere, as admirably presented by Dillehay. Numerous forts and more El Niño evidence bring out the bellicose nature of later Moche times and counter the ritual-sacrifice emphasis some authors find at more southerly sites. Again, the multiple, changing, and even conflicting information presented in this volume helps us recognize the dynamic nature of the Moche past; this can easily be seen as a good, if necessarily unresolved, place to be in the Moche scholarship. Bawden and Castillo each consider the end of the Moche (Castillo’s piece is cleverly entitled “The Last of the Mochicas”). Changes, seen rightly as innovation and not necessarily as devolution, are traced at Galindo by Bawden, and at San José de Moro by Castillo. Good evidence from art and archaeology alike is mustered to appreciate the diachronic spans of these key sites. Like the rest of the volume, the various strains of information, interpretation, and conjecture are well balanced and marvelously presented to lay the Moche once again to rest in the desert sands.

One can only conclude that a great service has been done, for both art history and archaeology, by the editor of and contributors to Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru. The specialist, the generalist, the struggling professor yearning to teach the Moche with up-to-date images and ideas—they all, no doubt, will rejoice in this publication.