纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 048莫希战士锅（4）（在线收听）

Excavations of Moche burials often uncover large numbers of these decorated pots, sometimes many dozens of them, all carefully ordered and organised around repeated themes and subjects. The sheer quantity of pots that survive tell us that Moche society must have operated on a considerable scale. Pots like this must have been an industry, with elaborate structures of training, mass-production and distribution.

Moche territory stretched for around 350 miles (560 km) along the Pacific coast, and theirs was, literally, a narrow existence - bounded by the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other, usually with just desert in between. But their largest settlement, at Moche itself, was the first real city in South America, with streets, canals, plazas and industrial areas that any contemporary Roman town would have been proud of. The remains of the canal network that they used to channel the rivers flowing from the mountains are still visible today. They also exploited the extremely rich waters of the Pacific for fish, shellfish, seals, whales and birds. There's one pot for example, in the British Museum, that shows a Moche fisherman in a large boat catching tuna. Carefully managing and irrigating their environment, the Moche grew maize and beans, farmed llamas, ducks and guinea-pigs, and as a result, were able to sustain a population three times as large as the area does today.

And yet, as is usually the case in human history, it is not the great acts of water engineering or agriculture that a society honours in its works of art. It's war.