Archaeologists study and compare styles and themes depicted in moche art for clues about lifestyle belief and cultural variation among these ancient people.
Moche ceramic vessels.
For many years the foundation of moche chronology was a five phase ceramic temporal seriation of moche style vessels established by larco hoyle 1946 1948.
Moche is fairly well defined temporally although its origins are less clear than its demise.
Moche sexuality of the thousands of ceramic vessels that have been recovered at least 500 of them display sexually explicit imagery typically rendered as free standing three.
The portrait was made during the late moche period ca.
The shaman wears a feline headdress and large disc earrings.
One particularly famous moche portrait vessel is known as the huaco retrato mochica.
Mochica style this modelled ceramic shows a priest or shaman engaged in a curing ritual or praying over a deceased person.
Photo by nathan benn wagner edu.
The ceramic portrait is also an example of a stirrup spout vessel of a moche ruler.
These phases were verified by archeological strata.
The decoration is sometimes painted on the smooth surface of vessels 67 167 4.
Moche skilled ceramists produced a great variety of exquisitely decorated vessels.
Other times it is tridimensional forming the vessel shape itself 82 1 30.
Moche ceramic pot vessel in the form of a recumbent anthropomorphic peasant playing the quena an andean flute.