Talk:Huaca

What's this nonsense about the Moche?

Aside from the section about huacas in politics being completely unsourced, inflammatory, and chock-full of old canards, um...it says this:

In fact the structure had nothing to do with Sol, or Sun worship. It was a Moche site: they believed not in gods as such, but in the concept of duality.

Really? Go read the article on the Moche: we don't even know what language they spoke, or what they called themselves. So how, in the name of the less-pleasant afterlifes of every religion, are we supposed to know what Moche theology was? It's hard to tell what Jewish theology is like--most observant Jews would be displeased, to say the least, if you denied they were monotheists, but Maimonides can certainly be interpreted as pantheist and Kabbalah as emanationist pantheist. And that's the theology of a people who are still around, and can tell you what the hell they mean!

My gut reaction is to delete the section, as largely valueless, false, and just plain nasty; if someone can't give me a rational explanation for its assertions in a week, I will. Nagakura shin8 (talk) 22:53, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

The concept of duality is very researched for the Andes and archeological evidence like geographical repartition of sites indicates dualism (yanantin is a general article on this). Andean socio-political organization was based on 1. Moieties (Hanan and Hurin or Urco and Uma), and 2. segmentary yet pyramidally organized socio-territorial units (as politics and private life or religion were not separated) which functioned with the help of reciprocity (collecting products and giving them to the centre) and redistribution (redistributing the accumulated surplus to acquire legitimacy). It is very plausible that the Moche functioned in a similar way. And huacas are not quite "deities" in the European sense. 10:26, 12 April 2025 (UTC) 2A01:599:B27:EBDC:FDE8:BC37:6CFD:A6A2 (talk) 10:26, 12 April 2025 (UTC)