{"it":{"id":"SAM-005","kind":"site","sub":"South America","name":"Huaca del Sol","place":"Peru","lat":-8.132,"lon":-78.995,"date":"The Huaca del Sol is an adobe brick pyramid built by the Moche civilization (100 AD to…","mat":"adobe;earth","nfacts":5,"tags":["Andes"],"sum":"Spanish colonists once diverted a river to wash away part of the Huaca del Sol in Peru, because they believed gold was inside. What survived is still one of the largest mud-brick buildings in the Americas.","why":"One of the largest adobe monuments in the Americas, partly dissolved on purpose for its gold.","src":[326],"nsrc":2,"yt":"What was lost with it?","rel":["SAM-002"],"hook":"Colonial looters turned the Moche River on the Huaca del Sol and washed away two thirds of it."},"S":{"326":["Wikipedia: Huaca del Sol","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaca_del_Sol"]},"rec":{"id":"SAM-005","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"It is believed to have originally been about","a":"height","v":"50","u":"meters","o":"It is believed to have originally been about 50 meters in height and 340 m by 160 m at the base.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Huaca_del_Sol&oldid=1364714557","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364714557 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2306"},{"f":"originally been about 50 meters in height and","a":"base length/width","v":"340","u":"m","o":"It is believed to have originally been about 50 meters in height and 340 m by 160 m at the base.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Huaca_del_Sol&oldid=1364714557","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364714557 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2307"},{"f":"50 meters in height and 340 m by","a":"base length/width","v":"160","u":"m","o":"It is believed to have originally been about 50 meters in height and 340 m by 160 m at the base.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Huaca_del_Sol&oldid=1364714557","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364714557 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2308"},{"f":"The remaining structure stands at a height of","a":"height","v":"41","u":"meters","o":"The remaining structure stands at a height of 41 meters (135 feet).","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Huaca_del_Sol&oldid=1364714557","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364714557 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2309"},{"f":"structure stands at a height of 41 meters","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"135","u":"feet","o":"The remaining structure stands at a height of 41 meters (135 feet).","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Huaca_del_Sol&oldid=1364714557","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364714557 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2310"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"The Huaca del Sol is an adobe brick pyramid built by the Moche civilization (100 AD to 800 AD) on the northern coast of what is now Peru.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Huaca_del_Sol&oldid=1364714557"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"The Huaca del Sol is an adobe brick pyramid built by the Moche civilization (100 AD to 800 AD) on the northern coast of what is now Peru.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"-8.1322","lon":"-78.9947","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0006 deg (~0.07 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1313530088"},"src":[{"id":"S0311","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Huaca_del_Sol&oldid=1364714557"},{"id":"S0498","t":"Wikipedia: Huaca del Sol","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaca_del_Sol"},{"id":"VSAM-005-3","t":"Huacas de Moche (PDF, latinamericanstudies.org)","u":"https://latinamericanstudies.org/moche/moche-huaca.pdf"},{"id":"VSAM-005-4","t":"Biblioteca Nacional del Perú: Las ruinas de Moche","u":"https://repositoriodigital.bnp.gob.pe/bnp/recursos/2/html/las-ruinas-de-moche/224/"},{"id":null,"t":"Hastings, C. M. and Moseley, M. E. (1975), “The Adobes of Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna,” American Antiquity 40(2), abstract, Cambridge Core.","u":"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/abs/adobes-of-huaca-del-sol-and-huaca-de-la-luna/F01D0B21AFFE3B20048E46F3DEAF4A22"},{"id":null,"t":"Complejo Arqueológico El Brujo, “Los adobes con marcas y la organización del trabajo en la sociedad Moche.”","u":"https://www.elbrujo.pe/blog/los-adobes-con-marcas-y-la-organizacion-del-trabajo-en-la-sociedad-moche"},{"id":null,"t":"Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, press note on the legal registration of the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna complex, 5 July 2023.","u":"https://www.gob.pe/institucion/cultura/noticias/792440-ministerio-de-cultura-culmina-saneamiento-fisico-legal-del-complejo-arqueologico-huacas-del-sol-y-de-la-luna-para-su-puesta-en-valor"}],"sum":"Someone pressed a fingertip into the top of a freshly moulded mud brick, left a few dots and a line, and let it dry in the sun. Multiply that small act by the tens of millions and you have Huaca del Sol, the great adobe platform of the Moche on Peru's north coast. Many of its bricks still carry those marks: dots, diagonals, circles, and less often hands, feet, animals, clubs or nets. They are a rare kind of signature from the people who built an ancient monument.\n\nHuaca del Sol stands in the lower Moche valley, about six kilometres from the Pacific near the city of Trujillo, at the foot of a peak called Cerro Blanco. Adobe is sun-dried mud brick, and a huaca is a sacred place or monument in the Andes. Peru's Ministry of Culture calls Sol one of the largest adobe buildings in the Americas. It forms one complex with Huaca de la Luna, a smaller and better-preserved temple with painted walls, and with the town that spread between the two. The Moche culture flourished on this coast from roughly AD 100 to 800, a ranked society whose rulers included the lord of Sipán and the lady of Cao, and this valley, which gave the culture its name, held the centre of the southern Moche state.\n\nThe size is the first thing every source reaches for. In a 1975 paper in American Antiquity, the archaeologists Charles Hastings and Michael Moseley wrote that Sol measured at least 342 by more than 159 metres and was the largest brick structure in South America. It was probably cross-shaped in plan, with four sections. They estimated that it took more than 143 million adobes, and Luna more than 50 million. Wikipedia gives over 130 million and a reconstructed original height of about 50 metres; what remains stands about 41 metres high.\n\nHow do two archaeologists see inside a mound that big? The answer is the reason it can be seen at all. Most of what Hastings and Moseley learned came from cuts left by looters, and the largest cut was made by a river. In one section, the colonial destruction left a profile 28 metres high, in which they counted eight construction stages, numbered I to VIII from bottom to top. Stage V held a burial with Moche Phase III pottery and Stage VII a tomb with Phase IV pottery, which ties the building's growth to the Moche ceramic sequence. Wikipedia puts the eight stages as complete by about AD 450.\n\nThe bricks themselves became a clock. The pair found that adobes in the two huacas differ in soil, size, mould and makers' marks, and that some of those differences change over time. Early bricks were thin, 8 to 11 cm, often made in moulds of narrow canes that left reed impressions on their sides. Later bricks were thick, 12 to 18 cm. Makers' marks first appear in Stage IV, on 75 per cent of the bricks examined there, and stay common through the later stages. They recorded 93 different marks at Sol, six of them very common and 63 rare. The marks almost vanish by Moche Phase V.\n\nThe building was laid up in tall, unbonded columns of brick they called skins and segments, from 0.4 to 2 metres wide and as high as the stage itself. By their estimate, in 85 to 95 per cent of the segments they examined, the bricks carried a single mark. Bricks in the same segment usually measure within 2 cm of each other, while neighbouring segments vary widely.\n\nThat pattern led to the leading explanation, which Hastings and Moseley framed as a hypothesis: a labour tax like the later Andean mit'a. A community met its obligation by sending a work party to build an assigned segment. The party made its own bricks, marked them, carried them to the site and laid them up. The state cared about the finished segment, not the individual bricks, so sizes followed each group's habits. The archaeologists at El Brujo, another Moche complex, read the marks the same way, as a ledger of who had done their share, and note that neighbouring blocks with different marks suggest several groups sharing a day's work. Wikipedia goes further and says the marks suggest more than a hundred communities took part. The model leans on later Andean practice recorded by Spanish chroniclers, which the bricks fit but cannot prove alone.\n\nThen came the river. The German archaeologist Max Uhle, in Las ruinas de Moche, cites the colonial chronicler Calancha: in 1602 some Spaniards took treasure worth 800,000 ducats from the huaca after diverting the river toward the complex, destroying its western walls. Hastings and Moseley put the loss at at least two thirds of the mound. Wikipedia describes the operation as a hydraulic mine, and adds that El Niño erosion and looting remain threats today.\n\nUhle himself was doubtful about the treasure. The burial area he excavated lay beyond reach of the flood, and in view of the general poverty of the complex's soil, he judged rich finds on the summit unlikely. Perhaps, he wrote, rich burials had existed only at the western foot of the huaca, exposed by the flooding. Since almost nothing of the summit survives, he could not say. Wikipedia describes the building as a place of ritual, a royal residence and a burial site; how it was used at each stage is only partly known, because the river took so much of it.\n\nThe irony is that the destruction made the science possible. The looters wanted gold and opened the mound like a book. What they left is a cross-section of eight building stages, written in mud by groups who signed their work with their fingers. The meaning of any one mark, whether it stood for a community, a family or a single workshop, is not settled.\n\nThe treasure hunters left a sum in ducats and nothing else. The brickmakers left almost nothing but their marks. How many other monuments still carry the names of their builders in a script nobody has yet thought to read?","qs":["How much of what we know about ancient America is shaped by what conquerors chose to destroy?","What did the treasure hunters find?","What can a river cut reveal that a dig cannot?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Huaca_Sol_lou.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Huaca_Sol_lou.jpg","title":"Huaca Sol lou.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"Unknown","cap":"","alt":"Huaca Sol lou"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/MuseoHuacasDeMoche.jpg/1280px-MuseoHuacasDeMoche.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MuseoHuacasDeMoche.jpg","title":"MuseoHuacasDeMoche.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"uranio (Luís)","cap":"Museo Huacas de Moche"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"100 AD","h":"Date from its main source","s":[79]},{"v":"Adobe, earth","h":"Made of","s":[79]}],"hs":{"79":["Wikipedia: Huaca del Sol (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaca_del_Sol"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/SAM-005.webp","w":1004,"h":661,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Huaca_Sol_lou.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}