Sex in Peru by Rick Vecchio - Part I

For decades, the huacos eroticos had been kept under lock and key, hidden from the public, accessible only to an elite group of Peruvian social scientists.

Historian Maximo Terrazos didn't know much about sex when he was growing up. Given his conservative Catholic upbringing in rural Peru, sex was a taboo subject that-simply wasn't discussed.

But then came a day in 1965, when the then-20-year-old university student joined a field trip to Peru's Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History and he experienced a sexual awakening.

"We were a group of 50 students, male and female, and we were taken through all the galleries," says Terrazos, who went on to devote a career to studying sexuality in ancient Peru. "At the end, we were told, 'Okay, the ladies can leave, the gentlemen stay for a moment."'

"We were taken down into a basement to a room marked 'Private,"' he says. "I was shocked because for the first time I was seeing huacos eroticos."

Locked in glass display cases before him were explicit ceramic depictions of sexual acts crafted more than fifteen hundred years earlier by the Moche, a highly organized, class-based society that dominated Peru's northern coast from about 0-800 A.D. All at once, Terrazos and his classmates were exposed to images of fellatio, intercourse, masturbation, heterosexual and homosexual sodomy, necrophilia and bestiality.

For decades, the huacos eroticos had been kept under lock and key, hidden from the public, accessible only to an elite group of Peruvian social scientists. Occasionally they were made available, reluctantly, to select foreign researchers from the United States and Europe.

"These artifacts were considered huacos pornograficos, dirty, obscene, thanks especially to that taboo imposed by the Catholic Church, which viewed sex as solely for procreation," Terrazos says. "Until that time, we were the first students who had ever seen them."

Gradual revelation of the erotic Moche ceramics opened the door to a wide field of study of sexual values in pre-Columbian Peru. In recent years, the artifacts have helped place a historical spotlight on centuries of brutal repression by Spanish conquistadors, colonial bureaucrats and priestly "extirpators of idolatry," bent on curbing sexual practices they viewed as courting deviltry.

Six years after publishing the first of his famous "Kinsey Reports: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Female," Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his research assistant, Harvard-trained anthropologist Paul Gebhard, traveled to Peru in 1954 to investigate the huacos eroticos.

Most non-Christian cultures fashioned idols to gods and goddesses of power and fertility with exaggerated genitals. The ancient Greeks honored several penis deities: Hermes, Priapus and Dionysus. The Romans exalted Bacchus, the Egyptians had Osiris, and Shiva reigned in India. Artifacts exist from each of these ancient cultures that represent, or at least hint at, sexual practices.

But the Moche culture is in a class by itself. Kinsey described its artifacts as "the most frank and detailed document of sexual customs ever' left by an ancient people."

Gebhard, who carried on Kinsey's work after his death, later wrote about their Peru study, recalling an era when "prudery" inhibited frank investigation of the ceramic erotica.

"Scholars avoided what they feared might be construed as an undue interest in them, and museum officials not infrequently concealed these items from inquiring scientists or brought forth only a portion of their collections," he wrote in 1970 in an article titled "Sexual Motifs in Prehistoric Peruvian Ceramics."

Gebhard also noted a squeamish tendency by their Peruvian hosts to interpret sexual material, particularly homoerotic themes, in a manner reflecting Christian values and prejudices instead of objective scientific inquiry.

"Even leading archaeologist and collector, Rafael Larco-Hoyle, strained to convince himself and others that some of the sexual scenes were meant to be moral lessons and 'admonitions as to the consequences of certain acts."

Larco Hoyle argued - without supporting evidence - that depictions of same-sex sexual acts in Moche and later Chimu pottery served as symbolic warnings against engaging in homosexual behavior. His collection constituted the greatest number of erotic Peruvian ceramics.

Then a travel agency in Peru would not have dreamed of including the explicit depictions in a Lima city tour. But the current Peru travel agent has a different perspective than the travel agent in Peru of years past. Larco-Hoyle's collection of erotic ceramics is the subject of guided Peru tours in a dedicated gallery in the museum that bears his name in Lima.

Kinsey and Gebhard faced several challenges in cataloguing and classifying the hundreds of artifacts they encountered. For one thing, the Moche often depicted sexual encounters with or between cadavers, in which gender distinguishing traits were lacking. In those, cases, the scientists attributed gender on the basis of context. "If a cadaver is behaving with a human female as a human male would, I have assumed that the cadaver is (or was) male,” Gebhard wrote.

Interpreting the Moche's intent in crafting the pottery has been the topic of debate between archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and theologians, alike. One of the enduring questions has been why the erotic ceramics were found almost exclusively as funerary offerings, discovered in the graves of not only adult men and women, but also children.

The artifacts depict myriad types of sexual encounters and positions, including mutual genital petting; males or male cadavers masturbating, or simply holding, disproportionately large penises; and, at least one vessel depicting a woman having sexual intercourse with a huge dog.

Many of the pieces do not depict sex at all but are sexual in nature. There are several whistles fashioned in the shape of male and female genitalia. Many other pieces are drinking vessels, with giant penises or vulvas forming the spouts.

Only a few of the known Moche artifacts clearly depict homosexual encounters. One such piece discussed briefly in the works of the historian Terrazos shows two warriors engaged in anal intercourse.

Two others, discussed at some length by Gebhard, involve cadavers. "One instance consists of a male lying on his side while a male cadaver lies behind him, spoon fashion, and apparently has anal coitus," he wrote. "The male's eyes are closed and Larco-Hoyle may be correct in suggesting that the scene represents a homosexual dream." The other vessel depicts two male cadavers lying prone, side-by-side, with an arm around each other and tongue kissing while one of them simultaneously holds a set of panpipes to his mouth.

No huaco erotico depicting lesbian sex has ever been found, and while many of the artifacts show women performing fellatio on men, none are known to depict cunnilingus. The majority of the pieces show heterosexual anal or vaginal coitus. In many cases, an infant is shown suckling or sleeping by the female's side, during the sex act. Scientists theorize the numerous depictions of anal intercourse indicate that it was a common sexual practice between couples as a form of contraception, particularly when infants were still breast feeding.

The Moche artifacts, while the most prevalent, are not the only examples of erotic art to come out of Peru's millennial past.

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