Golden Wonder

ENTOMBED WITH GOLD AND silver symbols of spiritual and temporal power, the Moche rulers of ancient Peru took their treasures, and their secrets, to the grave. Archaeologists studying extant murals, metalworks and ceramics could sketch an inexact portrait of the pre-Incan civilization that vanished around A.D. 800, but they were frustrated by the many remaining blank spaces. The absence of a written language meant there was no sure guide to lead them back to the lost culture.

Plunderers seeking gold were the first to find the shining key that would unlock a door to the past. In 1987 a local looter stumbled upon a royal tomb deep inside an adobe-brick pyramid near the village of Sipan in the Lambayeque River valley of Peru's northern coastal plain. The find was pillaged, and many artifacts from it soon began showing up on the international market for stolen art. Fortunately, three other tombs that have since been discovered in the pyramid were protected and excavated under the eye of an expert. As a result, a team of workers was able painstakingly to retrieve splendors from the darkness of a thousand years.

This week artifacts from the tombs go on display in New York City's American Museum of Natural History, along with a full-size reproduction of the burial site of a ruler called the Warrior Priest, or the Lord of Sipan. The wealth of information gained from the tombs' contents outshines the dazzling finds. Says archaeologist Walter Alva, director of the Museo Nacional Bruning de Lambayeque, who has overseen the excavation since the first days: "Sipan's importance for science transcends the glitter of the gold."

The exhibit, notes Museum of Natural History curator Craig Morris, combines art with science to highlight the objects' aesthetic appeal and at the same time emphasize modern archaeological techniques. "Each piece must be understood in relationship to everything else," he explains. Alva and his team made sure that the position of the items in each grave was recorded and analyzed. An ornament in closest proximity to the body, for example, had the greatest symbolic significance and conveyed the role of the person in the highly organized Moche society.

The frenzy that followed the original looting of the tombs seven years ago seemed like footage from an Indiana Jones movie. International collectors and dealers in antiquities joined huaqueros, the Peruvian term for grave robbers, in a rush for Sipan gold. During raids, police were able to confiscate some stolen material, and one huaquero was killed. Then, with the digging site secured and under guard, Alva and a team of archaeologists and workers located tombs that had been sealed off since their occupants were buried. He began what would stretch into years of patiently peeling away layers of debris and removing the delicate objects of metal, shell and stone that gradually unraveled the mysteries surrounding the lost culture. Pre-Columbian expert Christopher Donnan, of the University of California, Los Angeles, joined the project: photographs of tomb objects were made and sent for comparative analysis to UCLA's Fowler Museum, which has more than 135,000 pictures of Moche artifacts in its archives.