Moche society was agriculturally based, with a significant level of investment in the construction of a sophisticated network of irrigation canals for the diversion of river water to supply their crops.

Other major Moche sites include Sipán, Loma Negra, Dos Cabezas, Pacatnamu, the El Brujo complex, Mocollope, Cerro Mayal, Galindo, Huanchaco, and Pañamarka.

[8] Pampa Grande, in the Lambayeque Valley, on the shore of the Chancay River, became one of the largest Moche sites anywhere, and occupied an area of more than 400 hectares.

But Moche ceramics vary widely in shape and theme, with most important social activities documented in pottery, including war, agriculture, metalwork, weaving, and erotica.

Traditional north coast Peruvian ceramic art uses a limited palette, relying primarily on red and white colors, fineline painting, fully modeled clay, veristic figures, and stirrup spouts.

There are countless images of defeated warriors losing life fluids through their nose, or helpless victims getting their eyes torn out by birds or captors.

Images of captive sex-slaves with gaping orifices and leaking fluids portray extreme exposure, humiliation, and a loss of power.

[14] Several specific items also correlate to gender in Moche culture, such as a head cloth for men[16] and a long tunic for women.

[14] The Moche discovered both electrochemical replacement plating and depletion gilding, which they used to cover copper crafts found at Loma Negra in thin layers of gold or silver.

Modern attempts were able to recreate a similar chemical plating process using boiling water and salts found naturally in the area.

[20] Moche metal work gained attention after Peruvian researcher Rafael Larco Hoyle published Los Mochicas in 1945.

[20] Despite having no formal training in archaeology, Larco Hoyle was the first to truly attempt a systematic reconstruction of the Moche by drawing on information from excavations, art, iconography, Spanish documents, and modern traditions.

[21] The discovery of bronze and gold artifacts buried in the Warrior Priest tomb at the Huaca de la Cruz site one year later also encouraged further study.

The same would happen when burial grounds at the site now known as Loma Negra in the Piura Valley were unearthed by looters finding a wealth of gold, silver, and copper objects along with ceramic vessels.

Unlike European metalworkers, the Inca blew through long tubes to heat coals, rather than using bellows to create a forced draft of air.

That factor, far from discouraging the establishment of communities, was the trigger for the construction of an outstanding culture that developed engineering works that interconnected various river valleys, with the aim of irrigating desert territories.

Many of the Moche agricultural systems are still in operation, such as the Ascope aqueduct, the La Cumbre Canal, in Chicama, or the San Jose dam, which continue to provide water, coming from the Andean region and groundwater, guaranteeing several harvests per year.

All this allowed certain members of the community to no longer dedicate themselves exclusively to food production, and a process of specialization began that led to the development of the Moche civilization.

These rites appear to have involved the elite as key actors in a spectacle of costumed participants, monumental settings and possibly the ritual consumption of blood.

Excavations in plazas near Moche huacas have found groups of people sacrificed together and the skeletons of young men deliberately excarnated, perhaps for temple displays.

[29][30][32][33] Those lowest in the Moche hierarchy were buried in a simple hole near their household;[32] platform mounds with an abundance of goods were awarded to the highest-ranking members of society.

Chronologically, the Moche was an Early Intermediate Period culture, which was preceded by the Chavín horizon, as well as the Cupisnique, and succeeded by the Huari and Chimú.

He listed traits of the Moche culture such as "exquisite artworks" and the "creation of large scale facilities and public works" as a testament to this ranking.

Arguably the most significant event which shaped Moche archaeological research was the Virú Valley Project, beginning in 1946 and led by Willian Duncan Strong and Wendell Bennett.

Inside the tomb, which was carbon dated to about 300 AD, the archaeologists found the mummified remains of a high ranking male, the Lord of Sipán.

Also in the tomb were the remains of six other individuals, several animals, and a large variety of ornamental and functional items, many of which were made of gold, silver, and other valuable materials.

[41] In 2005 an elaborate gold mask thought to depict a sea god, with curving rays radiating from a stone-inlaid feline face, was recovered in London by the Metropolitan Police.

[43][44] In 2013 archaeologists unearthed the eighth of a series of finds of female skeleton that started with the Lady of Cao, together taken as evidence that the Moche were ruled by a succession of priestesses-queens.

According to project director Luis Jaime Castillo, "[the] find makes it clear that women didn't just run rituals in this area but governed here and were queens of Moche society".

[45] This discovery was made at the large archaeological site of San José de Moro, located close to the town of Chepen, in the Sechura Desert of the Jequetepeque Valley, in La Libertad Region, Peru.