KING TUT OF PERU
The night Walter Alva was dragged from his sickbed in 1987, he was 37, coughing through bronchitis, and certain the call could wait until morning.
The police chief said no.
On a table at the station, wrapped in newspaper, lay three objects that stopped the cough: a golden face with wide turquoise eyes, two giant peanuts of solid gold, and a snarling feline head of shell and metal.
Alva forgot he was ill.
By first light he, his 27-year-old assistant Luis Chero, and twenty policemen stood at Huaca Rajada, a dusty mound near the village of Sipán on Peru’s northern coast. The local textile mill had closed. Villagers, desperate, had begun tearing into the earth with shovels, hunting anything they could sell. Gold fever. When the police arrived the crowd scattered, leaving a field of holes.
What they had interrupted was the beginning of one of the greatest archaeological recoveries in the Americas.
Over the next twenty years the mound yielded an unplundered complex of tombs. The richest belonged to a man Alva named the Lord of Sipán — a warrior-priest of the Moche culture, buried a thousand years before the Inca and 1,500 kilometers from Cuzco.
He lay inside the first sarcophagus ever reported in the New World. Above him crouched a man whose feet had been removed, a sacrificed guardian who could not run. In the Lord’s right hand was a golden scepter shaped like an inverted pyramid.
He had died between 35 and 45, stood 5’4", and his teeth were barely worn. This was a man who ate a special diet.
He wore copper sandals and blankets studded with copper platelets. A pectoral of shell, bone and stone. An enormous crescent headdress of beaten gold. A gold face mask. Three pairs of gold earspools inlaid with turquoise. Two necklaces of peanut-shaped beads — ten gold, ten silver. Resting on his body: a nearly one-kilogram gold shield, feather ornaments, and gilded banners showing a central figure with arms outstretched.
A dog, two llamas, a nine-year-old child, two robust men, and three women aged 15 to 25 were buried with him. Around them: 211 pots and 451 ceremonial objects in gold, silver, copper, textile and feather.
The Moche flourished on the desert coast of northern Peru from 200 BC to 700 CE. They were independent warrior-priest lords, master weavers, potters, fishermen, and farmers who turned arid land into farmland with sophisticated irrigation. Their metalsmiths plated copper with paper-thin gold using electromagnetic replacement and depletion gilding — techniques so advanced they remain an active puzzle. At the time, they were likely the finest in the world.
The treasures now rest in two museums Alva still administers. The desert had kept its secret for thirteen centuries. Then it gave it back.
