The Museo Contisuyo is hidden within the ruined stone walls of the historic main church of Moquegua, which collapsed in an earthquake in 1868.
Housed in a modern building that echoes the flat-peaked "mojinete" roofline of traditional Moquegua houses, the Museo has artifact storage and laboratory space on the first floor, a permanent exhibition hall on the second floor, and an office, an auditorium, and a multipurpose hall on the third floor.
You can stroll through the exhibit hall on your own (everything is explained in English and Spanish), or have one of the Museo staff show you around.
The real Museo takes visitors through regional prehistory, from the first inhabitants through the Inka empire. This virtual tour just shows you a few of the more dramatic highlights. For the full story, come to Moquegua... or read about the prehistory of Moquegua, check out the hundreds of references in the regional bibliography, or visit some of the related web sites with articles about Moquegua archaeology.
The earliest periods are mostly known from stone points like these, fragments of bones, shell, and discarded parts of plants from food preparation, pieces of simple, utilitarian ceramics, and subtle traces of huts and other constructions.
Around 600 AD, colonists from the Tiwanaku state, centered up on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, established several settlements in the Moquegua area. They brought this style of black "Omo phase" ceramics with them.
By 800 AD to 1000 AD, there were several Tiwanaku villages in the Moquegua area. One at Omo featured a Tiwanaku style temple. The largest village, Chen Chen, bordered fields reclaimed from the desert with a long canal, and was surrounded by cemeteries holding an estimated 13,000 burials. This Chen Chen style portrait drinking vessel was probably looted from a burial at Chen Chen. It shows a mustached man wearing round earspools and a four-pointed hat like the one in the next picture. A clear bulge in his right cheek suggests that he is chewing a wad of coca leaves.
Four-pointed hats like this one were worn by the elite of Tiwanaku society in Moquegua. They were made of dyed wool and constructed by a complex method of hand knotting.
Flaring bowls, or "tazones", like this one are often found in Chen Chen burials with a wooden spoon resting in them, suggesting that they were serving vessels for food.
Not all Chen Chen style wooden spoons were this fancy. Many are worn on one side, showing that they were really used. The wear also shows that, like us, most of the Tiwanaku colonists in Moquegua were right-handed.
(photo from Contisuyo: Memoria de las Culturas del Sur)
Flaring drinking cups, or "keros", are also common in Chen Chen burials. A slightly later example excavated at El Algodonal, near Ilo, still contained the dregs of corn beer. Although keros are often said to be ceremonial items, broken pieces of them are so common at village sites that they must have been used often in daily life.
This wooden kero, however, was certainly not an ordinary drinking cup. The figure carved on it matches the "front-face diety" or "staff god" on the famous gateway of the sun at Tiwanaku. Traces of pigment indicate that this kero was at least partially painted white, with black and red details.
The dry climate and salty soil of Moquegua sometimes preserved artifacts that would normally decay away. These are just one of several kinds of sandals that prehistoric people wore here; others had ties made of wool, and some had short soles that left the toes sticking out, maybe for better traction on slippery rocks.
(photo from Contisuyo: Memoria de las Culturas del Sur)
While Tiwanaku settlers occupied the Moquegua area, immigrants from the Wari state to the north established a stronghold atop the sheer sided mesa of Cerro Baúl. In addition to a distinctive style of ceramics, they also made wide knife or projectile points from obsidian that they brought to the region. The Wari enclave at Cerro Baúl was aparently abandoned while Tiwanaku still occupied the area.
Around 1000 AD, the Tiwanaku state collapsed. The temple at Omo and many Chen Chen phase villages were intentionally destroyed, suggesting some kind of upheaval. The people who remained moved to defensible locations. Some, maybe immigrants from the coastal valley, adopted the Chiribaya style of pottery and textiles. This style was quite different from the Tiwanaku style, and was most popular in the coastal valley, which had never been part of the Tiwanaku state.
(photo from Contisuyo: Memoria de las Culturas del Sur)
The Chiribaya people in the coastal valley were farmers who also ate a lot of shellfish, fished with nets and hooks, and hunted large sea mammals with harpoons tipped with barbed heads like these. (The barb is missing from the one on the left.)
(photo from Contisuyo: Memoria de las Culturas del Sur)
Chewing coca was probably a daily part of life for the Chiribaya. Many Chiribaya burials contain one to three wool bags fitted with shoulder straps and full of coca leaves. Most coca bags were highly decorated with red, white, black, and sometimes other colors. This is a particularly fine example.
Wooden objects resembling childrens' tops are found in some Chiribaya burials and household garbage, sometimes in sets of two or three. They are not very worn on the tips as tops would be. They might be small net floats or tools used for hand-tying nets. Yet they are also found around Moquegua, a long two days' walk from the sea. Were nets used here for river fishing or some other purpose? Or were these "tops" used for something else altogether?
Around 1200 AD, people with ties to the high sierra, rather than the coast, began building fortified villages in the upper valleys above Moquegua. Although they made austere, simple Estuquiña style ceramics, they invested much more effort in building long canals, large stone-faced agricultural terrace systems, defensive walls, and burial towers called "chullpas" for their most important dead.
Unlike the Tiwanaku and Chiribaya, who used many bright colors in their highly decorated textiles, the Estuquiña people used mostly natural tones of llama or alpaca wool for cloth items like this coca bag.
Late in the 1400's, the Inka conquered the Moquegua area, bringing the Estuquiña into the Inka empire for the rich corn production of their terraced farmlands. The Inka established major and minor administrative centers, from which a small number of ethnic Inkas exercised control through Estuquiña vassal lords. When they died, these possibly foreign-born Inkas were buried with ceramics in the Imperial style, both standardized items such as the "aryballoid" jars found throughout the empire, and more ideosyncratic pieces like this deep plate or bowl.
The Inka revered Pachamama, the female spirit of the earth, and propitiated her and other spirits by placing offerings on mountaintops, in crevices and caves, and buried near buildings or fields. One kind of offering used throughout the Inka realm involved copper, silver, or gold figurines dressed in elaborate miniature garments, often decorated with feathers. This silver example (shown in three views) is said to have been found in a canal near Moquegua, where the moisture destroyed the textiles it was originally wrapped in.
The Museo Contisuyo exhibition ends with the Inka, who controlled Moquegua until the Spanish conquistadores arrived around 1534. But the story is still far from complete, and research based on new fieldwork as well as the existing collections stored at the Museo continues every year.
Sometimes the most exciting finds are fresh in from the field, or are only now being coaxed into telling their tales through detailed analysis, so be sure to stop by the lab and find out about the latest research!
Details and credits:
Copyright (c) 1999, Dr. Bruce Owen. All rights reserved.