Will this destroy our civilisation too?

“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke, 1790

I arrive in the city of Trujillo, in the northern part of Peru, early in the morning as the sun is just getting ready to come up. The long bus trips through the country are actually quite comfortable but they always seem designed to leave and arrive at the most inconvenient times.

Rather than turn up at my guesthouse while the owner is still asleep, I decide to spend a couple of hours at the bus station and wait until a more appropriate time to make my unannounced breakfast arrival. I always consider it a bad strategy to annoy accommodation providers within seconds of meeting them.

And so I take the time to read a little about Trujillo and what there is to see and do. It seems using my time to learn a bit more is a good decision because I make an important discovery. And it’s one that will turn out to have bigger ramifications than I realise.

The main reason I’m here is to see the archaeological site of Chan Chan and you might like to read my story about that.

But, with my research, I realise there’s also another very important site here called Huaca del Sol y la Luna – The Temples of the Sun and the Moon, in English.

The site is also known as the Huacas del Moche, named after the Moche culture that built them.

The Moche culture

The Moche was a culture that lived in northern Peru from about 100 – 800AD. They were an agricultural society with sophisticated methods of irrigation, hunting and fishing.

As far as archaeologists can tell, the Moche were also relatively peaceful with no major conflicts with other cultures of the time. Yet they met their demise after just 700 years when they should have been reaching their zenith.

So what happened? Well, there are no definite answers but the most accepted theory by scholars is something that should send a chill down our spines today. Climate change.

Scientific research, based on ice cores drilled from glaciers in the Andes, shows that this part of Peru was hit by a super El Niño in the 6^th century that produced 30 years of flooding. That was followed by 30 years of drought.

For a society that relied so heavily on agriculture, this rocked the very foundations of the Moche culture. But it was more than just a natural disaster that brought them undone – and this is where we should be particularly worried about the lessons for our time.

Researchers believe it was actually the response to this turbulent period that brought everything crashing down. Religion was seen as a way of controlling the weather – through human sacrifices and ritual prayers, for example – and when these no longer worked, the people lost faith.

The religious and political side of society was suddenly being questioned and the leaders’ insistence that they could fix the problem was proved to be false. Just imagine the chaos when human after human was murdered on an altar but their blood just brought more grief.

Meanwhile, the people were starving… for decades.

There is some archaeological evidence that fortifications were built within the Moche land after this time but there was still no threat from outside apparently. The theory is that people turned on each other.

With resources scarce and the community desperate, a form of civil war broke out to take and defend important assets like irrigation channels and prime farming land. Ultimately, though, it brought down life as they all knew it.

I probably don’t need to spell out the similarities with the challenges we face on the planet today. Although it was obviously a very different time technologically back then, human nature has changed very little over the centuries.

The fear is that we are doomed to repeat history and as the natural world changes around us, and we realise our leaders are powerless to stop it, our first instinct will be to turn on each other in a fight for our own survival. And ultimately that will mean the demise of our society.

Huacas del Moche

But, anyway, that’s enough pessimism for right now. I want to quickly tell you a bit about the Huacas del Moche site because it is a fascinating place. It’s actually made up of two pyramids that face each other – Huaca del Sol (Temple of the Sun) and Huaca de la Luna (Temple of the Moon).

Huaca del Sol

Huaca del Sol is basically a ruin these days and is inaccessible for visitors. But you can still see it well from the outside. It was made with 130 million adobe bricks and was the largest structure of its kind in the Americas at about 50 metres high.

Although it’s now only about a third of its original total size, it’s still 40 metres high and is impressive enough to look at from a distance.

Huaca de la Luna, on the other hand, is smaller but in much better condition. It was also built with adobe bricks and you can see that clearly when you go inside.

Huaca de la Luna

From a distance, though, it looks like a solid and foreboding structure. That was probably the aim, though, because it was used more for religious and ceremonial activities than its counterpart.

The highlight of the Huaca de la Luna pyramid is the friezes that cover some of the walls. The largest example is on (what is now) an exterior wall and this carved and painted mural gives an insight into the culture here. It really is enormous, as you can see in this photo.

Smaller murals inside the pyramid are also remarkably well preserved and show you a bit about the fluid religion of nature spirits that takes some influence from the Chavin culture.

You can walk through different levels of the structure to see these and other features, like the area where people were tied up and tortured before being sacrificed!!

My feeling is that Huacas del Moche is not the kind of site you would come all the way to Trujillo to see – but Chan Chan is and so this is definitely somewhere to add on while you’re here.

But, more importantly, if the Huaca del Sol y la Luna makes more of us think about the culture that built these great pyramids and why they disappeared so long ago… well, the lessons from that are probably the most critical part of any visit.

You’ll get a lot more out of the visit if you have a guide to explain everything. I would recommend this guided tour of Huaca del Sol y la Luna.

There are also some tours that will included Chan Chan. I would suggest this good budget option, and then there’s also this full day tour.