Caballo Muerto

Caballo Muerto, a complex of early sites located near the modern city of Trujillo in the Moche Valley on the north coast of Peru. The complex, probably the center of a larger multivalley polity, consists of eight U-shaped mound structures that are made of stone set in mud mortar and were sequentially constructed between 1700 bce and 400 bce.

The structure called Huaca de los Reyes (shrine of the kings) is the most elaborate architecturally. Built around 1500 bce, this site contains several platform mounds, colonnades, stairways, and over fifty rooms, all precisely arranged along three sides of two large plazas and two small plazas. Access to the site is gained from the east, where one enters the largest plaza, which could hold several hundred people. Access to the three remaining smaller plazas could only be gained through very narrow, restricted passageways and staircases.

Niches and column faces within the various plazas are decorated with impressive mud sculptures that probably depicted various aspects of the builders' mythology. The largest plaza is lined with repetitive heads of creator deities as well as full-figure depictions of a main ancestral cultural hero. Just to the west, the smaller of the two main plazas contains more varied depictions of the ancestral cultural hero, possibly reflecting different myths involving this hero. Immediately north and south of this plaza are two small plazas, each containing a mound frontally decorated with paired profile jaguar sculptures. The restricted access to three of the plazas, their small size, and the special nature of their associated mud sculptures suggest these plazas were the scenes of special ceremonial activities by privileged groups within the society that built the structure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thomas Pozorski, "The Early Horizon Site of Huaca de los Reyes: Societal Implications," in American Antiquity 45 (1980): 100-110, "Early Social Stratification and Subsistence Systems: The Caballo Muerto Complex," in Chan Chan: Andean Desert City, edited by Michael Moseley and Kent Day (1982), pp. 225-253, and "The Caballo Muerto Complex and Its Place in the Andean Chronological Sequence," in Annals of Carnegie Museum of Natural History 52 (1983): 1-40.

Additional Bibliography

Campana D., Cristóbal. Tecnologías constructivas de tierra en la costa norte prehispá nica. Trujillo: Instituto Nacional de Cultura—La Libertad, 2000.

Moseley, Michael E. The Incas and their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

Pozorski, Thomas. "Huaca de los Reyes Revisited: Clarification of the Archaeological Evidence (in Reports)." Latin American Antiquity, Vol. 6, No. 4. (Dec., 1995): 335-339.

                                      Shelia Pozorski

                                     Thomas Pozorski