纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 048莫希战士锅（2）（在线收听）

History has been kind to only some American cultures. The Aztecs and the Incas have an unshakable place in our collective imagination, but if I were to ask you where the Moche called home, you might be a little more hesitant. Experts in early American history are slowly coming to terms with civilisations that ran in parallel with, and were every bit as sophisticated as, their most advanced European counterparts, and the Moche are at the centre of that rethinking of the American past.

Around two thousand years ago, the Moche people built a society that was probably the first real state structure in the whole of South America. It developed in the narrow strip of almost desert land between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains. It was a civilisation that lasted over eight hundred years - from the rise of the Roman Empire around 200 BC to the Islamic expansions around 650 AD, and it's a history accessible to us now only through archaeology, as the Moche have left no writing. But what we do have from them is pots.

I'm in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum, where we have an array of these South American pots on show. They're over 1,300 years old, and they're an extraordinary sight to look at, ranged on the shelves: a series of small sculptures about 9 inches (25cm) high, made out of clay, brown with cream painting on it, and they conjure up a whole world. There's a pair of owls, there's a bat, there's a sea-lion eating a fish, there are priests and warriors, and all of them sit like small sculptures, but with a looped handle and a spout because, as well as being statues, they're jugs. What we have here in fact is a pottery representation of the Moche universe, and I want to choose one of these pots to take us further into that world of Peru 1,300 years ago.