纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 048莫希战士锅（6）（在线收听）

"We found that these were male warriors. Robust, strong, males aged between 18 to more or less 39 years of age. They had a lot of ancient injuries consistent with battles, but also had a lot of fresh injuries, a lot of cut marks on the throats, on the arms, on the faces, indicating that most of them have had their throat cut. And a few of them had the skin of their face removed, arms separated from their bodies, some of them were de-fleshed completely and transformed into skeletons - even in one case two human heads transformed into some kind of container."

It's grim and gripping stuff. And there's a lot of mystery still to unravel. The Moche stopped making these horror-movie pots, and indeed pretty much everything else, in the seventh century - roughly about the same time as the Sutton Hoo ship burial. Why? There are no written records of course, we've got to guess, and the best bet at the moment seems to be climate change. It appears there were several decades of intense rain, followed by a drought that upset the delicate ecology of their agriculture, and wrecked much of the infrastructure and farmlands of the Moche state. If that's what did happen, there would clearly be neither the time nor the resources to make pots. People did not entirely abandon the area, but their skills seem to have been used above all for the building of fortresses, which suggests a world splintering in a desperate competition for diminishing natural resources. Whatever the cause, in the decades around 600 AD, the Moche state and civilisation collapsed.

To most of us in Europe today, the Moche and other South American cultures are unfamiliar and unnerving. In part, that's because they belong to a cultural tradition that followed a very different pattern from Africa, Asia and Europe. For thousands of years, the Americas have a separate parallel history of their own. But as excavation unearths more of their story, we can see that they are caught in exactly the same predicaments as everybody else - harnessing nature and resources, avoiding famine, placating the gods, waging war. And as everywhere else, they addressed these problems by trying to construct coherent and enduring states. In the Americas, as all over the world, these ignored histories are now being recovered to shape modern identities. Here's Steven Bourget again: