The political capital of the Mochica living to the north of the vast Paijan plains was built from the sixth to eighth centuries AD at Pampa Grande, on the left bank of the Chancay river.Th urban compound lying at the foot of the Hill of the Gentiles spreads over a 2.000 by 2.400 meters area. Residential quarters for the elite and the populace, warehouses and workshops lie around scattered on both sides of the axis link-ing the main temple and other smaller ones. The former comprises a large pyramid and two pyramidal constructions surrounded by large walled spaces. Invaluable detail about the everyday life, production and economy of a Mochica capital city surfaced during the excavations at Pampa Grande. Like Sipan, Pampa Grande was built at a strategic location allowing overseeing and controlling a vast network of irrigation canals. In every valley in the northern Coast, the canals laid out at the beginning of the Christian era (Salinar civilization) carried water by gravity and turned the surrounding desert into fertile farming lands. Vast and flat, the Lambayeque coastal strip allowed the Mochica to undertake an enterprise with few equivalents in the world’s ancient history. Wide main canals, like Raca Rumi and Taymi, connected neighboring basins, as in the case of Saña, Chancay Reque and La Leche. Many of these canals are still in use today.Dispersed amidst an impressive carob tree (Prosopis juliflora) forest are the monumental mud brick construction of Batan Grande. The elongated towering platform walls have been carved by the rain of El Niño weather oscillations. Now known as the Poma Reserve, the forest gives the traveler a glimpse of the original scenery on the northern Coast when powerful warlords be-longing to the Sican –or Moon, in Muchik language- house ruled over this region. The Lambayeque civilization, another name archaeologist give the Sican culture, appeared in the ninth century when invading neighbors caused the col-lapse of the Mochica states.
Later, the Mochica political gravity center moved north to the distant La Leche basin. Sican lords spread their power over the coastal band from Piura to Jequetepeque, amassing considerable wealth. One probable source of such privileged position was the discovery of bronze enriched with copper and arsenic.Batan Grande has also become very well known for the other reasons. In past decades, grave looters sacked innumerable funerary chambers by digging deep wells, up to 14 meters down. The royal tombs have been carved inside pyramidal platforms at the top of which were usually court-yards, hypostylic halls, and other areas devoted to different ceremonial, administrative and residential functions.Some document instances point to a rite where the construction was purposefully set on fire and then abandoned. Photographs of room filled with gold, silver and gilded copper vessels, as well as stories about tons of buried precious metals, triggered a rush of looters to the site.Fortunately, some tombs escaped the greed of the looters. Archaeological surveys have determined that the Sican rulers were buried among est a funerary luxury not less impressive than their Mochica counterparts, Gold headpieces and masks, cinnabar-died feathers, clothes covered with semiprecious stones and tropical shells were placed over the corpses on the platforms.
