Vessel depicting cultivated landscape or pyramid

The desert north coast of Peru is bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Andes to the east. Here, the Moche, or Mochica, people flourished from before the beginning of our era until the seventh century. The cold Peru Current, running in a deep trough offshore, is normally one of the world’s richest fishing grounds. Using rafts formed of bundles of totora reeds, the Moche acquired from the ocean food and probably fertilizer—bird guano from offshore islands, as well as fish for this use.

The modern Peruvian departments of La Libertad and Lambayeque, which extend nearly 250 miles along the Pacific Coast north of Ancash, contain the principal remains of the Middle and Late periods of central Andean archaeological history. Two civilizations dominated the region: Mochica, which flourished from about 250 B.C. until after A.D. 700, and Chimu, governed by a dynasty enduring from about 1370 until the Inca conquest of the north coast valleys before 1470. The six centuries between …