The Moche (Mochica) flourished on the desert north coast of Peru from roughly the first to the eighth century CE, a thousand years before the Inca. They left no writing, yet recorded their world in some of the most lifelike pottery produced in the ancient Americas. They irrigated a barren coast into abundance, raised mountainous pyramids of mud-brick, worked gold with rare mastery, and sacrificed captured warriors to their gods. Whether they were one state or many related polities, and why they declined, are still debated.
The Moche left no writing. They told everything in clay instead. Their potters shaped portrait jars so exact that you can read the wrinkles and scars of a single living face, and modeled gods, animals, sea voyages, healers, prisoners, and acts of sex with the same unflinching precision. Some of their pots show a fanged figure cutting the throats of bound captives. For more than a century, scholars treated that scene as myth. Then archaeologists digging at the great mud-brick pyramid called the Huaca de la Luna found the captives themselves: dozens of sacrificed men, their bones cut and broken exactly as the pottery had shown. At least some Moche ritual art had been showing real practice, not only myth.