Dynastic History | Huaca del Dragón, La Esperanza — The Figures Came Out of Disturbed Ground

The platform stands in La Esperanza, a working district on the northern edge of Trujillo, hemmed in now by streets and houses. A perimeter wall with one opening; a ramp to the first level, a smaller ramp to the second, and on the upper level a row of storage cells for goods brought in from the country around. The outer walls carry reliefs modelled and cut into the mud: a two-headed arc usually read as a rainbow, with open-jawed figures beneath it. Two colours only, ochre and white, where other platforms in the Moche valley used five.

Which culture built it has moved. Mid-twentieth-century readings, Richard Schaedel's among them, placed it in the Middle Horizon, and popular accounts still call it Wari; analysis of the adobe proportions and the modelling technique now assigns it to the early Chimú phase.

From this huaca and from neighbouring Tacaynamo came a set of carved wooden figures. Margaret Jackson's 2004 study in Latin American Antiquity reads them as one programme rather than as ornaments: an interment, a procession of attendants around an important person, and the consecration of that burial through the killing of captives. She is explicit that the corpus was recovered from disturbed ground. The huacas had been dug over long before anyone recorded what lay where — the belief that gold and silver sat inside Chan Chan's walls and platforms drew treasure-seekers through the whole viceregal period.

What is left in place is the architecture and the mud. The figures are three kilometres away in the Chan Chan site museum, and one ticket covers both.

📸 Cover: The access ramp at Huaca del Dragón (Huaca Arco Iris), La Esperanza, Enrique Jara, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons