The Priestess of Chornancap

by Georges Fery

The history of the conquest of the Americas was written by Spanish conquistadors and later by historians. Until late 20^th century, it was believed that communities in ancient Peru were mostly led by men. In the early part of our millennium, however, field work led to discoveries that showed the inaccuracy of the historical record. In the Americas, societies led by women were as successful, or as ill-fated under similar circumstances, as those led by men. The discovery, in a funerary context at Chornancap in northern Peru, helped to understand the historical role of the socio-political and religious structures of communities ruled by prominent women rulers. This story is about one of them.

Peru’s Lambayeque culture is located within a complex of valleys and rivers in northern Peru that included, among others, the communities of Olmos, Motupe, La Leche, Lambayeque, and Zaña. Their cultural achievements were grounded in hydrology, ideology, and economy (Kosok, 1965, Shimada, 1995). An elaborate inter-valley irrigation system, such as the artificial waterways of Taymi and Ynalche, allowed for the fertilization of vast areas for agriculture. It is estimated that “at its apogee, two-third of the available land was cultivated, allowing to sustain over 150,000 people” (Kosok, 1959). Extensive agricultural production supplied markets in the central Andes and produced surpluses that allowed for the building of large public works. Among those were religious centers and their massive, truncated pyramids such as those of Pomac, Apurlec, Túcume (the largest in the Lambayeque valley with twenty-eight pyramids), Chotuna, Chornancap, El Mirador, and others. These temple pyramids were witness to the monumental power, skill, and prestige of the culture.

The Chotuna-Chornancap monumental site went through the three historic periods of the Lambayeque area: Moche, 100-700, Sicán, 700-1300, Chimú, 1300-1470 and Inca, 1470-1532. Of note, is that the funerary practices of the Sicán testify to an elite lineage that used a new religion to sustain and maintain their ideological power. Archaeologist Carlos Wester La Torre, director of the Brüning National Archaeological Museum in Lambayeque, notes that “foremost was the professional control of the faith understood as societal binding through rituals, central tenets of the socio-political and religious spheres. The administration of the state was balanced between water management, land, and religion as the main frame that legitimized the power and authority of a post-Moche new society” (2016).

The Moche civilization is alternatively called the Mochica culture, or early Proto-Chimú, (100-700AD).  The Moche were not a monolithic state for they were, to a certain extent, a group of autonomous polities sharing a common culture and religion within the Lambayeque River valleys. The restructuring and renovation of a complex pantheon of divinities was possible through a sacerdotal elite that appeared to the population during public ceremonies atop massive, truncated pyramids associated with the moon, the ocean, and the land. However, from where did the religious bedrock of the Lambayeque society spring from? The symbols found on ceramic, fabrics, bone, and metal artifacts refer to the legendary Ñaylamp, the god like figure believed to have arrived at the mouth of the Lambayeque River in 800AD on balsa rafts, with a large retinue of people. The area where he landed was already inhabited by groups of folks with their own beliefs and deities. Ñaylamp built his first city at a location called Chot, where the accompanying god Yampalec also resided. Ñaylamp’s twelve sons would be the founders of numerous communities in the multi-valley regional network.

There are several theories relative to the collapse of the Moche culture that, most probably was triggered by climatic events, as ice cores drilled from glaciers in the Andes revealed. Between 563 and 594AD, a major El Nino resulted in over twenty years of intense rains and floodings, followed by another twenty years of droughts. These events brought factions to struggle for control of increasingly scarce resources, disrupting Moche socio-economic and political structure that cast severe doubts in the people’s faith in their deities. Ñaylamp’s arrival coincides, a few years later, with the Cajamarca cultural florescence and “may have been instrumental to the fall of the Moche in the 8^th to 9^th century” (Castillo, 2003). When the Spaniards arrived, they called the deity and culture Llampalec, known today as Lambayeque. The collapse of the Moche culture was followed by the rise of the Sicán, so named by archaeologist Izumi Shimada, which inhabited what is now the north coast of Peru between 750 and 1375 (Shimada et al, 2004). According to Shimada, Sicán means “temple of the moon” while the culture is referred to as Lambayeque after the name of the region in Peru, that succeeded the Moche culture. It may be confusing, for the name Sicán is still controversial among archaeologists and anthropologists who argue over the fact that Moche and Sicán belong to distinct cultural horizons.

During the 2011-2016 archaeological seasons, La Torre uncovered a structure three hundred feet south of the Huaca (pyramid) Chotuna, giving hope that the site would be that of Chot, home of the mythic Ñaylamp. From the mid-twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty first, extensive field work by archaeologists provided a better understanding of how societies of northern Peru rose and fell, as well as a new vision of the function and importance of gender of the ruling class in the region (women were then known to have held high public and religious office in other cultures of Peru). In the neighboring Chicama valley two important sites were found that had been led by women, the Lady of Cao at the El Brujo archaeological site, and the Priestess of San José de Moro, a Moche burial place. The third site is that of the Priestess of Chornancap, the focus of this article; her remains were found on the side of the Chornancap pyramid by La Torre and his team.

The discoveries at Chornancap underlined the role of women in the Lambayeque culture who were associated with powerful connotations grounded in ancestry, divinity, and mythology. At that time, the Lambayeque culture was ruled by its nobility and religious institutions that controlled the multi-valley communities. The relevance of women of high status in Peru, such as those of the Lambayeque, Nazca, Wari, Lima, Inca, and others are corroborated far back in time by elaborate burials and palaces. Remnants of the past reflect a cultural world view integral to its environment and, from earliest times, was grounded in nature’s binary oppositions such as: night-day, up-down, black-white, male-female, life-death, and so on. In other words, the world was perceived in constant flux and in harmony with what Eliade called the “eternal return” and “the regeneration of time” (1954). It is no less important to stress that this binary factor in the evolution of mythologies, rituals, and social organization of human societies, aimed at bringing together the physical and psychological natural attributes of genders in a reciprocal and complementary fashion.

The Chotuna-Chornancap site is located five miles west of the town of Lambayeque, about seven miles northwest of the city of Chiclayo, and eight miles from the Pacific coast. We will not expand our story to the Huaca Chotuna, which is related to the legend of Ñaylamp, but on its twin and neighbor, Huaca Chornancap, the last sanctuary of the priestess known by that name. Chornancap is a one-hundred-and-thirty-foot high, three levels truncated pyramid in whose immediate vicinity the remains of the priestess were found. In both Chotuna and Chornancap, remains of occupation such as remodeling and burials, “are testimonies to constant reshaping of rituals to meet significant political and religious events and social milestones” (La Torre, 2015). Chornancap’s T-shaped truncated pyramid is aligned east-west with a central ramp that reaches its three superimposed platforms.

In 1980-1982, Christopher Donan conducted extensive research at Chornancap and mapped the site. He discovered remarkable polychrome murals emblematic of the Late Lambayeque mythology associated with the intermediate period of the Chotuna-Chornancap complex, 1100-1300AD. The elite residential area was found on the south side of the Chornancap pyramid. La Torre and his team, during the 2011-2016 archaeological seasons, cleared a 4,500 square foot area adjacent to the polychrome murals. Within this area they found a remarkable structure, thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, with a small ramp linking a four-foot-wide aisle that included two-foot high and five-foot wide benches running on its east and west sides.

At the south end of the aisle archaeologists found a finely crafted low L-shaped structure that, after careful clearing and cleaning, proved to be a wide seat, its back resting on the south wall. Four holes on the ground beyond the seat’s sides may have received high wood poles supporting a light roof to shade the individual seated below; archaeologists refer to this as the throne room. During meetings, seven counselors and other authority figures would kneel on the low benches on each side of the aisle.

Two hundred and sixty-five feet from the pyramid a ceremonial area was identified integral to the complex. It was there in 2010-2012, and over subsequent field seasons, that La Torre and his team found the first indication of the second burial of a high-status individual. Second burials are a well-documented practice in most ancient cultures throughout the world and still seen in the Americas. The first, or primary burial addressed the decomposition of the body’s soft tissues. After four to five years, once the decomposition of soft tissues was complete, the bones were removed from the primary burial site, and cleaned by women who were long past the age of reproduction. Once cleaned, the bones, along with appropriate offerings, were transferred to a separate but permanent second burial site, after the bones were wrapped in a bundle made of local fabrics or other material.

The concept of a coffin was still in use, but the bundle was specifically introduced for predominant members of the nobility. For the burial ceremony, the bundle was carried upright on a litter with the mask, crown, and gilded adornments of the departed. This gave the effect that the soul of the person in the bundle was still “alive,” an impression that could not be created using a casket. It was believed that the bundle allowed the soul to be a part of its own final funeral while on its way to the other side of life to meet his or her ancestors. Of note is that not all progenitors qualified as ancestors. Only those that left a significant impact on resource acquisition or lineage alliance were worthy of being venerated. But let us follow, even so briefly, where Wester La Torre and his archaeological team leads us.

A few feet below ground level archaeologists found several fine double-spout Cajamarca style ceramic vessels. Three feet below that layer was found a one-hundred-and-fifty square-foot oval floor ringed with stones. The foot-and-a-half thick floor, made of a finely grounded mud, showed the footprints of four men who evidently dampened it to seal the tomb. The dampening of the seal was then accompanied with the sound of drums and the blowing of strombus conch shells from the ocean. This ceremonial not only addressed a practical process for the structural protection of the grave bellow. It was a dance associated with burial rituals, when the four men sealed the grave and the last ritual as guardians of the world of the living. Excavating below the floor, the archaeologists found two large covers made of grassy fibers that protected the grave. The first cover of about fifty-five square feet, was laid down on an east-west axis, while the second was folded and placed to the west. Both covers showed five-inches-round laminated copper discs in lines of nine (width) and ten (length). The iconography on each disc is representative of the classic composition of the Moon and the anthropomorphic wave of the ocean, key symbols in rituals of the Sicán or Lambayeque religion.

Below the covers was found the priestess’ mortuary bundle made of large brown pieces of fabrics, wrapped around her skeletal remains, on which was the imperturbable burnished copper mask representative of the Lambayeque culture. The eyes on the mask were shaped as wings in the Moche style, while three small metal beads in the shape of tears were applied on each cheek, a metaphoric representation of tears of the soul’s sadness upon leaving this world for the divinized other. Over the mask was a fragile crown of burnished copper establishing the high status of the individual.

 

This is Part One of a Two-Part article. Read Part Two Here.

 

Photo and Art credits:

El Brujo Complex – AlisonRuthHughes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Lambayeque Area ©arqueologiadelperu.com
Naylamp & Yampalec Landing ©georgefery.com
Huaca Chornancap ©arqueologiadelperu.com
3D Throne Room arqueologiadelperu.com

References Cited and Further Reading:

Izumi Shimada et al., 2004 – An integral Analisis of Pre-Hispanic Mortuary Practices
Christopher B. Donnan, 2011  –  Chotuna and Chornancap
Izumi Shimada, 1995 – Cultura Sicán
Carlos Wester La Torre, 2015 – Chornancap : Historia, Genero y Ancestralidad en la Cultura Lambayeque
Justin Jennings, 2008 – Catastrophe, Revitalization and Religious Change on the Prehispanic North Coast of Peru
Izumi Shimada et al., 2010 – Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture
Carlos Wester La Torre, 2016 – Libro Chotuna-Chornancap
Jeffrey Quilter, 2001 – Moche Politics, Religion, and Warfare
Carlos Wester La Torre, 2018 – Personajes de Elite en Chornancap
Luis Jaime Castillo B., et al., 2005 – La Sacerdotisa de San José de Moro
Paul A. Kosok, 1959 – Life, Land and Water in Ancient Peru
Patricia A. McAnany, 1995 – Living with the Ancestors
Mircea Eliade, 1954 – Le Mythe de l’Eternel Retour
Bloch & J. Parry, 1982 – Death and the Regeneration of Life

About the author:

Freelance writer, researcher and photographer, Georges Fery (georgefery.com) addresses topics, from history, culture, and beliefs to daily living of ancient and today’s communities of the Americas. His articles are published online at travelthruhistory.com, ancient-origins.net and popular-archaeology.com, as well as in the quarterly magazine Ancient American (ancientamerican.com), and in the U.K. at mexicolore.co.uk.
The author is a fellow of the Institute of Maya Studies instituteofmayastudies.org, Miami, FL and The Royal Geographical Society, London, U.K. rgs.org. As well as member in good standing of the Maya Exploration Center, Austin, TX mayaexploration.org, the Archaeological Institute of America, Boston, MA archaeological.org, the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. americanindian.si.edu, and the NFAA – Non-Fiction Authors Association nonfictionauthrosassociation.com.
Contact: Georges Fery – 5200 Keller Springs Road, Apt. 1511, Dallas, Texas 75248, (786) 501 9692 –gfery.43@gmail.com and www.georgefery.com