Huaca Rajada
archaeological site in northern Peru
Huaca Rajada, also known as Sipán, is a Moche archaeological site in northern Peru in the Lambayeque Valley, that is famous for the tomb of Lord of Sipán (El Señor de Sipán), excavated by Walter Alva and his wife Susana Meneses beginning in 1987. The city of Sipán is dated from 50 to 700 AD, the same time as the Moche Period.
Significance
Sipán is an archaeological site where royal tombs were discovered and excavated between 1987 and 1990, a fairly recent find in the last 30 years, and is considered to be a very important archaeological discovery. Many of the tombs were looted, yet the artifacts that remained and were discovered by archaeologists play an important role in understanding the Moche rulers and tradition. Tombs have been found also in Sipán's Huaca Rajada, an area near Chiclayo. The tombs in the area are of adobe construction, of pyramidal shape, and have now shown erosion which could have been exacerbated over time by successive El Niño events. There is very little research on the commoners of Sipán, yet it is well known that the commoners often paid a tax through labor which allowed for the creation of the burial platforms for the Lords of Sipán. These platforms and other adobe structures are often made with marked adobe bricks which tracked this labor in order to pay off taxes. Other than providing labor for the Lord there is very little known specifically about Moche commoners from Sipán.
The tombs of Sipán allowed for archaeologists and anthropologists to get a better understanding of the Sacrifice Ceremony of the Sipán rulers that had been illustrated on murals, ceramics, and other decorative goods.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2716571. VIAF identifies the subject as 316431818. Authority coordinates are -6.801, -79.602. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Huaca Rajada” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.