"Discovering the New World's Richest Unlooted Tomb" by Walter Alva in "National Geographic" (October 1988, pp. 510-548) Like many a drama, this one starts violently, with the death of a tomb robber in the first act. The chief of police rang me near midnight; his voice was urgent: "We have something you must see--right now." Hurrying from where I live and work--the Bruning Archaeological Museum in Lambayeque, Peru--I wondered which of the many ancient pyramids and ceremonial platforms that dot my country's arid north coast had been sacked of its treasures this time. Pillaging tombs has long provided extra money for many people in the Lambayeque Valley. As cash income dries up between sugarcane harvests, villagers of Sipan speculatively eye an imposing, flat-topped pyramid and a massive adobe platform nearby, and gangs of looters put new edges on their shovels. These structures were built by a people known as the Moche. From about A.D. 100 to the close of the seventh century these agricultural Indians flourished in the desert margin between the Andes and the Pacific, raising huge monuments of sunbaked mud and laying within them their noblest dead. They also buried fine gold and pottery so alluring that in decades of excavation archaeologists have rarely found a major Moche tomb unplundered. The artifacts, and the priceless knowledge they represent, almost always disappear in an insatiable international black market for stolen pre-Columbian treasures. What awaited me at the police station in February 1987, I was sure, would be but the poorest castoffs of a grave robber. Such castoffs! Among 33 antiquities confiscated from a local looter's house were the gilded copper faces of two jaguar- like felines, baring shell fangs. A pair of gold peanuts gleamed three times natural size, wrinkled and ridged precisely like real peanuts. A gold human head, broadfaced like an infant's, returned my astonished stare with heavy-lidded eyes of silver and cobalt pupils of lapis lazuli. The grave looters' tradition is, unfortunately, an old one. The first came in 1532, when Spanish conquistadores began ransacking the Inca Empire for gold, silver, and gems. The eroded facades of Moche shrines must also conceal troves, reasoned the invaders, and they tunneled energetically. In the 17th century looters even diverted the Moche River to undercut a pyramid. Across time countless of these ancient adobe structures, which Peruvians today call huacas, have yielded enough exquisite pottery, jewelry, goldwork, and other antiquities to inflame the covetous hearts of generations of collectors. To satisfy their passion, they have encouraged bands of huaqueros, or grave robbers. Scaling the scarred slopes of the Moche pyramid at Sipan can be treacherous work. Often enough I've missed a handhold or foothold and braked short of disaster only at the cost of skinned palms and buttocks. Yet some huaqueros dare the climb at night and, once at the summit, shovel by lantern or flashlight. The Moche platform near the foot of the Sipan pyramid presents an easier target. Weatherworn to the shape of a mound, the platform at its base extends 230 feet by 165 feet. Rising a mere 33 feet, it lies within handy reach of nocturnal diggers. I can easily imagine huaqueros scurrying like shadows on the February night last year when by chance they penetrated a burial chamber within the platform. Hastily the plunderers broke up necklaces, bracelets, and other ornaments to sell piecemeal to middlemen who in turn supply Peruvian and foreign collectors. For protection they posted armed lookouts atop the Moche platform and the pyramid of Sipan. For good reason. According to police, a twin of the little gold head they seized is now for sale in the collector's netherworld for $60,000. A clandestine bid for a similar gold figurine has topped $100,000. Local police tried to recover the plunder. Several days after the raid on the platform they searched a looter's house. He was away, but behind the house they found dozens of fragments of gilded copper--remains of figures and ornaments that, because of their low commercial value, had been broken to pieces and thrown out. The police mounted a second raid in the predawn hours. This time the adversaries met face-to-face, and one of the looters was fatally wounded. The village was in shock. But the artifacts that been plundered from the platform would lead to a magnificent discovery. Into the Tomb of a Moche Lord Perhaps the finest example of pre-Columbian jewelry ever found emerged near the looted tomb in a second, sealed chamber. A gold-and-turquoise ear ornament holds a thumb-size figurine with a movable nose piece and war club, a crescent-shaped headdress ornament, and a minuscule owl's head necklace. This was not art for art's sake. A skeleton found with the figurine was attired in much the same fashion. The treasures unearthed by the looters could only have come from a tomb of unprecedented magnificence. Could the ancient Moche of Peru, who built the massive mound 17 centuries ago, have hidden other royal tombs in its depths? I believed so. Now, a year of intensive excavation has brought to light one of the richest and most significant tombs ever found in the Americas--the clearest mirror of the little-known Moche culture. Several similar burials may surround it, forming a royal mausoleum. From this extraordinary burial we recorded treasure after treasure: A solid gold headdress two feet across, a gold face mask, a gold knife, multiple strands of large gold and silver beads, a beautifully crafted rattle hammered from sheet gold and hafted with a solid copper blade, gold bells showing a deity engaged in severing human heads, a pure gold warrior;s backflap shield weighing nearly two pounds, and exquisite gold-and- turquoise ear ornaments. Additional skeletons found in the burial chamber, along with the sumptuous grave goods, conjure up an elite of retainers, concubines, and warriors. They served in life at the pleasure of the tomb's chief occupant, were sacrificed at his death, and lay hidden beside him for a millennium and a half. My friend and colleague Christopher B. Donnan believes he was a warrior-priest. Perhaps his awed subjects titled him as I do: Lord of Sipan. Discovery of this Moche ruler casts in high relief a people whose refined art and technology rivaled that of the Maya, their Central American contemporaries. In ceramics and weaving, the Moche were worthy predecessors--by some 1,200 years--of Peru's more storied Incas. While never empire builders like those conquerors, the Moche nevertheless extended their dominion across a 220-mile-long swath manner of the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia. By diverting rivers into impressive networks of canals and channels, they transformed a barren hinterland into a fertile territory of enviable abundance. The oasis valleys that they farmed sustained well over 500,000 people, more than live there today. With organized purpose the Moche employed their surplus energy to erect lofty pyramids and master clever metalwork. They almost certainly traded with peoples as distant as present-day Ecuador and Chile. For all their sophistication the Moche never developed a writing system, not even glyphs such as served the Maya. Nor are there foreign chronicles of their history, like the accounts in which Spanish conquistadores and priests recorded Inca ways. Fortunately, however, the Moche immortalized scenes of ritual, mythology, and warfare with a legacy of richly decorated pottery. Indeed, almost all we know of the Moche has been deduced from these ceramic masterpieces. Searching for the tomb, my colleague Luis Chero Zurita and I faced stiff competition from huaqueros and gold-crazed villagers. Gold fever gripped the people of Sipan and other villages. Men, women, and even young children flocked to the adobe mound. Using shovels, sieves, and bare hands, they poked and pried in a frenzy for scraps of metal, beads--anything the huaqueros might have discarded or overlooked. Lest vandals entirely raze the platform, we persuaded police to make surprise patrols until we could launch a rescue operation. For the time being our goal was modest: to salvage whatever information and artifacts had escaped the looters' pillage. As soon as possible we set up a tent at the site. In April we paid the first wages to workmen out of funds contributed by a pasta manufacturer and a governmental development agency; a local brewery chipped in, and the National Geographic Society made a generous grant. Invaluable encouragement and support came from the National Institute of Culture of Peru, the Bruning museum's formal patron. Tension ran high during the first weeks of our excavation. Angry villagers. who were barred from the platform, viewed Luis and me as a higher class of thieves, intent only on enriching ourselves. Brothers of the slain huaquero daily swore vengeance, shouting curses and death threats. The policemen guarding the platform prudently kept their heads down when the funeral cortege passed by along the road to the cemetery of Sipan. There relatives and friends laid the dead looter to rest. Tomb robbers a thousand years from now may prematurely exult when they stumble on the highly polished black marble slab of the huaquero's grave marker, glowing amidst poor wooden crosses and weathered slabs. Surrounding them all lies a ransacked ancient cemetery, pock-marked by looters. Protecting the platform at night proved a challenge. Luis and I camped out at its base and mounted three-hour watches with our workmen, two student archaeologists, and a policeman. Several times staccato bursts from the policeman's submachine gun shocked me from sleep--warnings fired above the heads of huaqueros sneaking up in the dark. Mornings we awoke to the dispiriting sight of the platform marred by more than a dozen large pits dug before our vigil began. Where the huaqueros had struck their bonanza, there gaped a hole 23 feet deep branching into a honeycomb of caverns and tunnels. Using ropes and buckets, we spent days simply clearing the pit of broken brick. Near the bottom we uncovered the first hint of what was to come. Here we found the imprints of wooden beams that had once roofed a small chamber. Sockets for supporting posts had been cut into bricks laid some time earlier, evidence that the chamber was not part of the original construction. Unlike the ancient Egyptians, the Moche did not design their pyramids and platforms as mausoleums, but to serve as religious enclaves and administrative centers. Only at a ruler's passing was a chamber carved out to accommodate his body--almost as an afterthought. Moche workmen had to race bodily decay when entombing a master. Modular construction methods eased their task: Moche pyramids and platforms are built of rectangular bricks arrayed like bread loaves in wide and distinct vertical stacks that abut but do not bind each other. Moche laborers built the platform at Sipan and one of the two pyramids before A.D. 300. Other hands laid the mud bricks of the second pyramid after 700. By then Moche culture was in decline, for reasons still obscure. Some scholars envision the Moche sapped by a slow and peaceful invasion of peoples from the south. An alternative theory cites warlike highlanders called the Huari, sweeping down from the Andes to the east. Before the Moche and after them, peoples of the coast built adobe pyramids and platforms. From the top of the Moche pyramid at Sipan you can pick out 28 such other huacas within an easy walk. Vulnerable to looters, the adobe huacas face another enemy: rain. In an average year the north coast of Peru receives less than half an inch of rain, preserving not only the huacas but also their builders; many have come down to us as leathery mummies. At intervals, however, shifting Pacific weather patterns known as El Ninos unleash torrential downpours. In 1983 I waded sopping from house to office at the three-story Bruning museum to rescue mummies and other relics from basement exhibit cases menaced by floodwaters, a museum director literally bearing the weight of the past on his back. During the centuries, El Nino rains have whittled down the platform at Sipan by about three feet. The Moche pyramid too has shrunk by some 12 feet. Without caretakers to renew the original skin of sun-dried mud, its steep sides have grown deeply gullied, until the earthen temple resembles a mammoth block of beige chocolate melting in the sun. Yet it still towers nearly a hundred feet high. Even greater Moche pyramids break the horizon elsewhere between the Andean cordillera and the sea. A colossal one endures 350 miles north of Lima, Peru's capital. Dubbed Huaca del Sol--Pyramid of the Sun--it dominates the valley of the Moche River, cradle of the Moche culture. Among the largest man-made structures in South America, it looms 135 feet tall, covers 12.5 acres at its base, and contains more than a hundred million bricks. Erecting a pyramid or platform probably took a generation or more. The platform at Sipan ascends in three tiers, in careful north-south alignment. So many mud bricks went into it and its companion pyramids that a nearby borrow pit scooped out by the brickmakers remains today as a small lake. Hundreds of men working in teams added gravel to mud and pressed the mix into small wooden molds, then baked the bricks in the hot sun. Unaided by the wheel, other laborers passed fresh bricks hand to hand to workmates who stacked and mortared them with more mud. As the platform and an attached ramp rose higher and higher, scaffolding appeared, a roost for plasterers. The coat of mud and sand that they applied protected the platform's sloping sides and sealed its level top. Immortality of a sort memorializes the men who made the bricks for the platform of Sipan. In the wet faces of new bricks they scratched their marks: an X, an S, a trident or circle or other symbol. Some bricks preserve handprints. I find it eerie to splay my hand across such a brick and find my fingers perfectly matched to those of another, long dead. A possible vision of Moche ceremonial life emerged one day from the huaqueros' lucky pit. A heavy copper scepter, more than three feet long and embedded in a side wall, had escaped earlier detection. When we freed it, we beheld at its top a curious and complex scene sculptured in miniature. A supernatural creature, half feline and half reptile, copulated with a woman upon a dais canopied by a peaked roof. Forming a balustrade around this dais were mace heads ranged in double file. Above, on the ridgeline of the roof, 17 tiny double-faced human heads were each crowned with a horned helmet. Might the erotic scene represent a myth of world creation or fertilization of earth? Or perhaps the semidivine origin of Moche royal dynasties? With its platform and pyramid and its mystique of a semidivine personage, Sipan must have been a focus of spiritual life in the Lambayeque Valley. Nevertheless we know little of the Moche's religion, although their well-planned burials testify to faith in an afterlife. The strange deity of the scepter--if deity he is--turns up in scenes on Moche pottery from widely separated locations and from different periods spanning hundreds of years, demonstrating his high and lasting importance. Only rarely, however, does he appear on a dais or throne-like platform, sheltered by an elaborately decorated roof. I came to believe that a canopied throne or sanctuary once stood on the platform at Sipan, together with a small number of storerooms and housing for a favored elite. It was difficult to restrain my excitement when in June 1988 we discovered the first fragments of clay heads, exactly the same as those represented in the scepter. For the first time we learned directly that the Moche decorated the roofs of their palace compounds or shrines with painted, baked-clay sculpture. In such a reserved compound there would have moved servants, concubines, warriors, and priests, all attending a sovereign. Accepting homage and tribute, performing priestly duties himself, and standing confidently at the apex of the social pyramid with absolute power of life and death over his subjects, he must have seemed a demigod. The Moche had a keen sense of how best to distribute themselves in the Lambayeque Valley in order to wring the last drop of advantage from limited supplies of moisture. At Pampa Grande, 12 miles east of Sipan, they erected two immense platforms in the narrowest part of the valley, a natural chokepoint from which to control water flowing down from the cordillera. The strategic location of Pampa Grande, the ruins of numerous storerooms at the base of its platforms, and huge quantities of potsherds point to it as the valley's administrative and urban hub. Ten thousand people may have lived there. From Pampa Grande to Sipan the Moche constructed a broad irrigation canal, the lifeline of the valley. Sections of this high-banked channel still exist, and I've often driven its now dusty bed; cattle and schoolchildren also find it a convenient sunken thoroughfare. Following gravity's lead, the Moche farmed wherever water would flow; their main canal supplied a vast system of irrigation ditches that permitted them to till right to the foothills of the Andes. Avocado and other fruit trees lined causeways lacing irrigated fields of beans, peppers, potatoes, squash, corn, peanuts, and manioc. There were harvests in all seasons. With all arable land reserved for growing food, villagers found living space on a hillside beyond water's reach to the east of the platform at Sipan. Their houses were mud walled and roofed with thatch. The Moche enjoyed a diet rich in protein and probably better balanced than that of many modern Peruvians. Fish from the nearby Pacific were eaten fresh or sun dried. They ate Muscovy ducks and guinea pigs. To drink, there was potent chicha, a cloudy beverage fermented from corn that had been ground and boiled. Deer, now rare, were abundant, but they were the exclusive prey of nobles. Crayfish in irrigation ditches supplemented seafood from the coast. To fish, to hunt sea lions, and to reach offshore islands, Moche mariners voyaged miles from land in tiny, high-prowed boats made of reed bundles lashed together like pontoons. Kneeling or trailing their legs in the water as if astride horses, they paddled with split stalks of cane. Even now some Peruvian fishermen venture to sea in such bobbing caballitos--little horses. In the coastal village of Santa Rosa, not far from Sipan, boats can be seen planted upright in the sand like surfboards to dry in the sun. These modern versions embody a feature the Moche would have appreciated: foam cores for added buoyancy. Still a riddle as we ended our post-mortem in and around the huaqueros' pit was whether the platform at Sipan concealed any other important Moche burials. We had unearthed at upper levels several modest graves of a later people who used the monument as a ready-made cemetery for commoners. We had also uncovered a section of the platform filed in with loosely compacted sand and small stones. As we probed this fill--it was old but clearly younger than the surrounding brick--the suspicion seized Luis and me that here the platform had been opened and resealed in Moche times. The imprint of another set of wooden beams, long since rotted away, reassured us that we were on the right track. The ten-foot timbers had enclosed a rectangular chamber about four feet deep. Sand sifting through the roof gradually filled the chamber below. Against this smothering blanket we made slow headway with the archaeologist's dustpans and paintbrushes. At last the flick of a brush bared the lid of a red clay pot, and tedium vanished. Now every fillip exposed small pots, bowls, beakers, jars. We eventually inventoried more than a thousand pieces in all, perhaps the greatest cache of pre- Columbian ceramics ever excavated. The Moche had pottery for every need. They produced huge amounts of strictly utilitarian ware--for cooking, for storing water, for stockpiling dried beans and corn. Other clayware bore intricate iconography. Red-and-beige patterns, kaleidoscopic at first sight, resolve themselves on second look into oft repeated motifs. One seen repeatedly in Moche art is the burial theme: Two men strain with a rope sling to lower a coffin-like shape into the earth. Subtle ceramic portraits depict warriors, hunchbacks, women giving birth, agonized prisoners pinioned to racks, and erotic sexual encounters. I have no doubt that master Moche potters many times worked from life. The personal details they incorporated in their art-- down to warts and wrinkles--lend a striking individuality to faces split with laughter or peering cool and haughty behind tight-lipped smiles. These portraits, as well as naturalistic representations of animals, plants, and insects, traditionally grace so-called stirrup-spout bottles--beautifully crafted vessels with a characteristic handle-spout. The sole example in the cache we found was tensed in a crouch: an alert-eyed iguana. Hundreds of red clay beakers were more crudely but humanly styled, like so many gnomes. Their coarse surfaces, the absence of wear, and their often identical shapes betrayed them as copies of a few basic designs, mass-produced in molds. In these motifs, prisoners sat naked and suffered the humiliation of leash-like rope collars. Musicians clutched drums. Some figures knelt, their throats hung with necklaces and their earlobes adorned with large ornaments. Others puffed their chests beneath beaded pectorals, or kissed the air in salutation of a deity. In the tomb many of these mannequins stood arranged in symbolic tableaux, like figures in a Christmas creche. Musicians and prisoners, for example, ringed and faced nobler personages. More trooped double file. A few figure posed alone and apart, contemplating a half shell of Spondylus, a type of oyster venerated in Andean tradition as food for the gods, or meditating before deposits of llama bones. Llamas yielded food, wool for garments, and dung for fertilizer and fires, and served as long-distance freight carriers. A macabre final discovery awaited us in the pottery chamber. Looking as if he had once been a contortionist, a man's skeleton lay jackknifed on its back, with chin, crossed arms, and knees all forced into a joint-popping tuck. More than anything, the remains resembled a bony embryo. Nearby rested several semicircular copper sheets, once parts of headdresses, and a naturalistic human mask, also made of copper. Tantalizingly, they seemed not to be personal adornments of the contortionist. Thus his status could not have been so exalted as to demand llama sacrifices at his death and the hasty manufacture of a huge pottery collection. Could he have been a sacrificial offering--perhaps a voluntary suicide--buried to honor someone of far higher rank who might be entombed deeper in the crypt? We pressed forward with our search, turning to a different filled-in section of the platform. We burrowed daily until dusk; plumbed the mound mentally after dark. By lantern light Luis and I speculated endlessly about what might lie below our feet. A grand, undisturbed funeral chamber was our dream, although realistically we couldn't discount the chance that we might merely be rooting in debris dumped by the platform's builders. Our expectations soared when, 12 feet below the surface of the platform, we came upon a second human skeleton. Badly deteriorated, it belonged to a man about 20 years of age. The position of the skeleton and faint traces of cane and fabric showed that he had been wrapped in cotton cloth and buried stretched out on his back. There was other evidence of a solicitous burial. Lumps of copper still lay where they had been slipped into the dead man's left hand and mount. A fragmented helmet of gilded copper rested upon his skull; a round copper shield covered his ribs. Obviously this person had been a warrior--a class profusely illustrated in Moche art. Had the young warrior died in battle? A sharpened bone lay beneath his skeleton, but nothing told of death by violence, nor even by degenerative disease. Yet the man's fate was certainly out of the ordinary, for we found to trace of his feet. The poor preservation of his skeleton made it impossible to tell if these had actually been amputated. Nor could we determine if they had disappeared before or after death. As out expectations for the tomb rose, Luis and I began speaking of this strange warrior as the "guardian." And we grew convinced that his missing feet symbolized his duty to remain forever at his post, vigilant and on watch. Guarding whom? We dug on. By early July we had consolidated the guardian's delicate bones with acrylic preservative and disinterred them in a block-- rather like quarrying stone. Painstakingly we probed for the boundaries of the chamber in which he lay. A stratum of adobe bricks guided us around the final corner of a square opening in the platform, 15 feet on each side. From the 12-foot depth where we had discovered the guardian, we began lowering the chamber floor. Twenty inches farther down we again found traces of wooden beams. The beams themselves had long ago disintegrated, as had those found earlier. But the indentations they left in the earth and a few crumbly fragments were revealing. Seventeen rough-hewn timbers, as much as eight inches in diameter and 13 feet long, had rested on a pair of cross supports. Radiocarbon tests later gave a date for this assembly as A.D. 290, plus or minus half a century. By now we interpreted wood as the harbinger of a find. Sediments showed that some of the timbering had slumped a foot, suggesting a caved-in roof--and thus another chamber beneath. Then came a revelation that held us transfixed: Beneath our brushes materialized a bright green sheaf of ribbon-like copper strapping so artfully worked that the corroded metal resembled leather lashings. With quickening pulses we dusted off seven more of the enigmatic copper straps. Together they marked the corners and sides of a rectangular area four feet wide and seven feet long that was faintly imprinted by three vanished wood planks. For long seconds breath and words would not come; only a ripple of birdsong drifted into the excavation to break the enchanted silence. When we finally spoke, it was to babble: "A coffin! It's sealed.... Never opened!" No one else in Peruvian archaeology had ever reported finding such a coffin. Not even Hiram Bingham, the American explorer who discovered several Inca ruins and who in 1911 slashed apart the jungly growth of centuries to reveal the mountaintop citadel of Machu Picchu. Now more than ever we worked as carefully as surgeons laboring over life. To penetrate gingerly into the coffin, we used artists' brushes and air squeeze bulbs. Puff by puff, dust and sediment parted. Each layer and object was meticulously sketched and photographed where it was found. Quickly we understood that the contents of the coffin were layered and somewhat jumbled, disturbed by the fall of the chamber roof. From fragments of gilded copper backed with brownish fabric, we made out two weavings, one embellished with four small figures of a single man, the other bearing a larger representation of the same man. In broad-legged stance, with arms upraised and fists clenched, he brought to mind a circus strongman flexing his biceps. I interpret the decorated weavings as being a personal ensign or royal banners. A V-shaped headdress of gilded copper sheeting two feet across bore yet another figure of the man, with a nose ornament and owl necklace, thrusting out his chest in raised relief. The V flared widely--two outstretched arms with open palms. Lifting a small clod beside the copper sheet, I gave a start--as who wouldn't, peered at by a meticulously detailed miniature man of hammered sheet gold, clad in a turquoise tunic. This sprite--he stood no bigger than my thumb--may be the finest single item of jewelry yet to come from pre-Columbian America. Only under a microscope could we appreciate the exacting craftsmanship of its creator. A tiny war club, seemingly gripped in his right hand, slid free to the touch. A gold ornament swung from the septum of his nose just as it might in real life. A miniature removable necklace was strung with pinhead-size likenesses of an owl's head; a pair of holes perforated each one to hold strands of gold wire. Tiny crescent-shaped bells swung from the little man's belt, and the tendons in his gold legs stretched taut. By reassembling scattered bits of gold and turquoise that surrounded this homunculus, we later found him to be the three- dimensional centerpiece of an ear ornament, flanked by a warrior on either side. Now we began uncovering the skeleton and lavish grave goods of the man in whose honor the gold effigy had been created: the Lord of Sipan. A pair of gold eyes, a gold nose with two gold ornaments, and a gold chin-and-cheek visor overlay the Lord of Sipan's shattered skull like a death mask. A gold saucer-like headrest cradled the cranial fragments. Exquisitely faceted pieces of turquoise formed mosaics of deer, ducks, and warriors on three different sets of disk-like ear ornaments, including two fitted with the little man of gold and a matching companion. Sixteen gold disks as large as silver dollars lay where they had adorned the royal chest. Perfectly round, they gleamed like miniature suns. Holes in the disks had been enlarged, as by a cord, indicating that the necklace had been worn regularly and not simply for occasional ritual display. Signs of wear identified other everyday items, including clamshell-like tweezers for plucking whiskers. No such use marked the copper sandals we discovered on the feet of the Lord of Sipan. Strictly ceremonial wear, they were impossibly stiff for comfortable walking. Not that it mattered: Like Inca rulers, Moche sovereigns were often borne on litters. The panoply of high rank seemed endless. We found four headdresses--two large gold crescents and two conical caps of cane fiber that were stitched with fine cotton thread and mounted with filigreed rondelles of gilded copper. Sediments in the coffin bore traces of feathers that adorned the copper-handled headdress ornaments. Hundreds of minute gold and turquoise beads told of elegant bracelets, and thousands of white, coral, and red shell beads formed bib-like pectoral coverings. Five of these draped the chest and shoulders of the Lord of Sipan; two rested atop his legs; four more lay beneath his skeleton. We found insignia of war: atlatl darts and a small symbolic war club with a shield in mid-handle. I picked up a long rattle with a gold chamber that resembled an inverted pyramid. Its copper handle was sculptured with shields and battle clubs and terminated in a wicked-looking blade. Scenes in relief on the rattle chamber were all too easy to decipher. In these a man wore much of the now familiar regalia of a Moche warrior. Tugging the hair of a hapless prisoner, he pitilessly thrust a war club at his head, bringing to mind the sacrifice of prisoners for blood offerings. I put down the rattle with the queasy suspicion that the Lord of Sipan had known all too well how to wield this symbol of his rank. And what of him, that fierce aristocrat: How did he die? Was he young or old? did his people lament his passing? Bones in the tomb answer some of these questions. First-millennium bones are often brittle, ephemeral things, and the skeleton of the Lord of Sipan was largely blackened splinters. We gathered shards of the skull, crushed as the timbers vaulting the coffin recess decayed and earth settled. Of other bones we found, only four vertebrae and the two heel bones remained whole. We could not extricate this skeleton, like a fossil in stone, as we had the guardian's: That would damage artifacts lower down in the coffin. But coats of acrylic preservative hardened the disjointed bones in a unifying matrix of surrounding sediment; slipping slats of wood underneath, we carefully raised the skeleton. From the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., physical anthropologist Dr. John Verano came to examine it. He gauged the Lord of Sipan to be five and a half feet tall and in his early 30s when he died. His back may have stiffened a bit at times from incipient arthritis, and a cavity etched a canine, but his full set of teeth showed little wear. To what could this man in his prime have succumbed? We can rule out poor diet and prolonged bone-damaging or deforming diseases. But not, say, sudden death in an epidemic. Suddenly or no, the Lord of Sipan departed his people prematurely. A shocked society must have momentarily tottered, shaken and unbalanced. And balance was mystically, profoundly important to the Moche. An eerie sense of this crept over me as I lifted a pair of necklaces from the skeleton of the Lord of Sipan. Those identical strings each held ten metal peanuts, similar to those looted. Five peanuts in each necklace were of gold, and all lay upon the Lord of Sipan's right side; matching silver peanuts lay to the left. Paralleling this, an ingot of gold nestled amid the bones of his right hand, an ingot of copper in his left. The Lord of Sipan lay with head to the south and feet to the north, the position of his skeleton lying across the east-west axis of the platform. Such heed to the four cardinal points of the compass--to the four quarters of the world, the Moche would have said--is typically Andean. Very probably two and perhaps as many as four other royal tombs lie within the platform, and we can only wonder if they share this harmony. At the head of the Lord of Sipan's coffin we uncovered the bones of one young woman and at the foot the bones of another. About 20 when they died, they may have been concubines of their master, if not his wives. One wore a copper headdress and rested on her right side, head pointing west. Her opposite was exactly that, lying with her head to the east. Head to head with the women and flanking the coffin were the upward-facing skeletons of two men. Both had live to around 40. Copper shield, headdress, and war club marked one as a warrior. The other, perhaps an assistant, lay buried with a dog, likely one of the spotted, whip-tailed breed that Moche iconography depicts chasing deer with aristocrats. It may have been the Lord of Sipan's personal and prized hound. In final preternatural balance, the warrior and one of the women lacked left feet, so that their crippled legs ended at diagonally opposite corners of their master's sarcophagus. I watched from eastern hills one evening as the sun set beyond the platform and pyramid at Sipan. Backdropped by a flat horizon, distant from any visual yardstick, those commanding earthen heights seemed expressly sited to feed one's sense of awe and dreamy wonder. When the glowing sky slowly flushed rose, I recalled Moche grave offerings of salmon-shaded Spondylus shells. It was not hard to imagine a funeral cortege making its way along a causeway across irrigated fields, a litter bearing the Lord of Sipan among his stricken people in final procession to his tomb. I pictured priests hollow-eyed with mourning, matching strides to carry the burden smoothly. In my reverie, somber warriors trod heavily, the gilded copper royal banner flashing high above their nodding headdresses. Through the dreamscape, following the bier, came two young women soft and serene, escorted by a pair of warriors-- one the guardian--and joined by another man, a hunting dog at his side. I fancied all their faces ecstatic, their minds filled with the coming embrace with death. The sun's last rays faded, and in the deepening dusk the Lord of Sipan's platform and pyramid lost form and melted into shadow. Descending a stony hillside, I was thoughtful, tranquil. Mysteries of the Moche still baffled me, but no matter--I had seen and would not forget their majesty.