The History Blog

The  has been discovered at the Huaca de la Luna archaeological site in northern Peru. The tomb dates to the 6th or 7th century. It contains the skeletal remains of a small child who was no more than two years at time of death. The sex could not be determined from the initial osteological examination, but he or she was someone important.

Huaca de la Luna (Temple of the Moon) was one of two religious complexes in the ancient capital of the Moche culture, today known as Cerro Blanco, built less than three miles from the modern-day city of Trujillo and from the Pacific Coast. From the 3rd to the 9th century, Moche architects built platforms out of adobe blocks (huacas), then ritually filled them in, encased them in adobe blocks and built platforms on top of them. At least six phases of construction have been identified in the capital, using millions of adobe blocks. The increasingly enormous platforms were connected to each other by an intricate network of ramps and plazas, and smaller platforms were built next to the major huacas.

The team unearthed the tomb inside the Uhle Platform at the Huacas de Moche archaeological site in northern Peru. The Uhle Platform is a mausoleum, attached to the Huaca de la Luna temple, with a patio archaeologists call the Patio of the Serpents. Of the more than 80 burials previously uncovered there, the tomb represents the only known child to receive this sort of lavish burial.

The tomb is large and could easily have been used to bury an adult even with all the grave goods, another indicator of the high status of the child. It contains 32 ceramic objects, most of them vessels. One rare object is a sculpture of a deity with a human body and the wings and tail of a bird. He holds a shield in one hand and a goblet in the other. On each side of him is a bird attendant garbed in ceremonial clothes. It’s possible that the sculpture represents a deity in the midst of transformation rather than a human-bird mixture. Because the Moche had no written language, there is debate among scholars about whether they worshipped a pantheon of multiple gods, or a small number who were capable of multiple transformations.

Another rare find is a pair of the ceramic prisoners of war.

The two prisoner sculptures are associated with the “ritual of combat,” a common theme in Moche art. In this sort of imagery, two warriors fight each other, and the loser is stripped of his clothes and weapons, tied around the neck with a rope and offered as a human sacrifice, Rengifo-Chunga said. The prisoners depicted on these two vessels were the losing warriors, and their presence in the burial of a child is rare.

“One would normally presume that these kinds of vessels represent something related to the deceased’s life,” Rengifo-Chunga said. For example, a vessel like this might signify that the individual took part in combat.

But a toddler couldn’t have taken part in such an activity. In general, archaeologists wouldn’t expect to see elements of an adult ritual in the burial of a child. “This expands our knowledge on Moche funerary practices,” he added.

The artifacts recovered from the tomb have been transferred to the laboratories of the Santiago Uceda Castillo Museum in Peru. There they will undergo scientific analysis and study and will be conserved for eventual display.

A rare monumental inscription likely dating to the Augustan era has been discovered at the site of ancient baths in Fortuna, Spain. It is a fragment, but the surviving lettering is comparatively huge: 23 cm (9 inches) high. Extrapolating from the size of the text, the original inscription would have been about 4.8 meters (15.8 feet) long when intact. Monumental inscriptions on this scale are extremely rare on the Iberian Peninsula. Only three comparable examples are known in the Region of Murcia, all of them in the major metropolis of Carthago Nova (Cartagena).

The ashlar block almost 1.2 meters (4 feet) long was discovered in the northern part of the Roman thermal complex. It was inside a wall that was not its original location, reused as building material in antiquity. Before the discovery, archaeologists thought that wall was part of the northern enclosure of the baths, but the reused stone means that it was built in a larger phase of construction.

There are two lines of text framed by decorative moldings with lettering in two sizes: the large 23 cm text on the top line and about 13 cm (5 inches) high on the line below. Text of these dimensions suggest the inscription was originally part of a large architectural feature, meant to be read from a distance.

Preliminary analysis has identified the end of a Roman name and writing characteristics that point to a chronology situated between the end of the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, possibly during the period of Augustus.

Experts suggest that it may have been a commemorative inscription related to a monumental architectural work, although its exact function still needs to be determined.

The baths of Fortuna is one of the most important thermal sites in Roman Murcia. Archaeologist from the University of Murcia have been excavating and studying the thermal complex for years. The current intervention is part of a project funded by the regional government to excavate, document and recover the baths’ ancient structures with the goal of increasing understanding of its usage in the Roman period and to conserve the remains for the long-term stability of the heritage site.

The ashlar has been raised and transferred to the Archaeological Museum of Murcia, where it will be studied, documented, and conserved.

An excavation of a late 5th century burial mound in central Japan has uncovered a clay figurine representing a female shaman (miko). The figurative clay sculpture, a haniwa, is well-preserved, with its features still finely detailed and extensive surviving red paint.

Excavations at the Nishikaminomiya Site began in 2020 as part of a Tone River improvement project. Since then 11 burial mounds from the Kofun period have been discovered. The largest mound is Tumulus No. 1 at approximately 160 feet long. It is surrounded by a moat is 60 feet wide. The haniwa was discovered in this year’s excavation of the southern end of Tumulus No. 1 adjacent to the Tone River. It had rolled down a protruding section of the mound into the moat.

Haniwa were made of unglazed earthenware and placed on grave mounds as protective markers. The figural haniwa were typically sculpted on top of a simple cylinder that had been the earliest form of the statue in the 3rd century. The cylinder was buried leaving the figure above ground to mark the burial sites.

The newly-discovered example is only a torso and head (the buried base has broken off) and is about 16 inches high. It depicts a woman wearing a sash with her hair styled in the Kofun Shimada (topknot) identifying her as a shaman. The top of the head is made of clay cord, conveying with its texture the tied hair. The face, sash lower section of the garment and bracelet on her right wrist are painted red. She holds a rod-shaped object in her left hand that was used in religious rituals. Made in the second half of the 5th century, it is one the earliest anthropomorphic haniwa to have been found in the Gunwa Prefecture.

Miko were popular subjects for haniwa. In the Kofun period, miko performed religious rituals at Shinto shrines and temples, falling into ecstatic trances to relay the words of the gods to worshipers. Historians believe miko held significant religious and political authority in Kofun society, and their visibility on the tombs of the elite confirms they figures of importance and authority.

Excavation is now complete. The haniwa will go on display next week at the Gunma Prefectural Museum of History.