Sex, Death, and Sacrifice in Moche Religion and Visual Culture (Bourget)

Steve Bourget's archaeological and iconographic study of the Moche civilization of Peru's north coast, published by the University of Texas Press in 2006. Drawing on excavated sacrificial deposits and ceramic and mural imagery, Bourget documents the so called Decapitator deity, commonly named Ai Apaec in the modern literature, and argues that Moche ritual sacrifice, sexuality and death imagery formed one integrated religious system tied to fertility and the agricultural water cycle rather than separate cultic strands. Its strength is direct archaeological evidence from sites such as Huaca de la Luna. Its limit is that, the Moche having left no deciphered texts, deity names and precise meanings remain the modern scholarly convention rather than an indigenous designation.