{"id":7561,"date":"2013-10-01T15:16:59","date_gmt":"2013-10-01T20:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fertur-travel.com\/blog\/?p=7561"},"modified":"2017-09-11T18:57:33","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T23:57:33","slug":"girl-power-in-ancient-peru-of-the-moche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fertur-travel.com\/blog\/2013\/girl-power-in-ancient-peru-of-the-moche\/7561\/","title":{"rendered":"Girl power in ancient Peru of the Moche"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Internet exploded with girl power fervor last month over the discovery of a 1,200-year-old tomb belonging to a high Moche priestess. It was the eighth elite female mummy excavated at San Jos\u00e9 de Moro in little more than two decades \u2014 evidence that women governed in that region of ancient Peru. Jezebel posted this enthusiastic headline:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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\"Film<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Newly-Discovered Tomb Confirms That Badass Women Ran Ancient Peru<\/em> WHO RAN THE PRE-HISPANIC REGION OF PERU? PRIESTESSES.<\/em><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Map<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In layman’s terms, a more accurate headline might have been: Women co-ruled ancient Peru with men, and \u2014 at least in the case of the Moche \u2014 were no less “badass”<\/em> than the guys.
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Let’s take a closer look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mummy was the eighth priestess to be discovered at San Jos\u00e9 de Moro since 1991. “Our excavations have only turned up tombs with women, never men,” archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo, project director of San Jos\u00e9 de Moro, told Agence France-Presse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The discovery of this latest tomb, he said, “makes it clear that women didn’t just run rituals in this area but governed here and were queens of Mochica society.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The find is no anomaly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dama<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 2005, about 50 miles south of  San Jos\u00e9 de Moro, archaeologist, R\u00e9gulo Franco Jordan \u2014 inspired, he said, by a San Pedro-fueled shamanic dreamscape vision \u2014  discovered the intact tomb of another ruling strata Moche priestess, the Lady Cao. This woman,  lived during an earlier period of the Moche’s eight-century reign \u2014 some 400 to 500 years before the priestesses unearthed at San Jos\u00e9 de Moro \u2014 making her the earliest known female ruler of pre-Columbian Peru. She’s been described as a sort of Cleopatra of South America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her body was decorated with tattoos of snakes and spiders, and she is believed to have died from complications after giving birth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before hitting too hard on the “Women Ruled” angle, there’s something else to take into account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amid all the archaeological discovery in Peru during the past 30 years, it is becoming clear that many, if not most, of Peru’s pre-Hispanic cultures shared some basic ideas about the cosmos, and their role in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the shared concepts that shaped religious ideologies, and influenced social organizations and interpersonal relationships between men and women in Peru for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish was duality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a universe of complimentary and opposing forces that bound together the spiritual world and the animate world. Mountains, rivers, the sun, moon and stars were perceived living, interacting deities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The duality of male and female was perhaps the most fundamental of the polarities. But we’re not talking about anything resembling a stereotypical, modern dichotomy of  her emotional and intuitive Mother Earth versus his more aggressive maleness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of the Moche, blood was the main currency of political and ideological belief. It was the highest symbol of regeneration and integration between the people and their deities. The women were right in there with the men, wielding sacrificial knives and ritual paraphernalia for ceremonies in what many people today would consider temples of doom. In one of the central Moche religious themes, a cup filled with the blood of a sacrificial victim is passed among iconographic figures representing the governing elite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Nothing<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Based on what the figures are wearing, and how they correspond to the garb found on the mummies in the Moche tombs, a prevailing theory has developed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n