Mar 30, 2025
A Moche ceramic stirrup bottle in the form of an ocelot.
From Peru, 100-800 CE,
Courtesy: BIZEN Museum of Latin American Art, Japan
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from Finland
seen from Bulgaria
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Germany
seen from Sweden
seen from Mexico
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Singapore
seen from Azerbaijan
seen from Romania
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
A Moche ceramic stirrup bottle in the form of an ocelot.
From Peru, 100-800 CE,
Courtesy: BIZEN Museum of Latin American Art, Japan
It's early in the morning and I'm wishing I had a time machine so that I could go back in time to the Peruvian Moche culture circa 1st to 8th century so I could tell their pottery makers how much I love their ceramics. Mayhaps even buy a piece for my collection.
Ditto Colima culture of Mexico and their ceramic puppers
copper fox head | c. 300 - 400 CE | moche (modern day peru)
in the linden-museum stuttgart collection
~ Portrait Head.
Date: A.D. 0 - 600
Place of origin: Chimbote, Peru
Culture: Moche
Medium: Clay
Stirrup-spout bottle: spotted feline. Moche. 350-550 CE.
Dallas Museum of Art.
Culture: Central Andes, North Coast, Moche Period: Early Intermediate Period Classification: Containers - Ceramics
These little statues are ceramics made by the Moche people of first-millennium Peru. For a long time, conservative scholars weren’t willing to talk about them because so many of them show all different types of sex: anything from sex between monkeys to sex between skeletons to monkey-skeleton-sex, and a whole bunch of stuff that seems pretty queer.
This particular one shows two men embracing – it’s not as explicit as many of the other works, but for a long time scholars categorised this as a depiction of conjoined twins, despite it looking the same as a bunch of other pots identified as people embracing!
It’s difficult to be sure what the Moche had in mind when making these pots, and but it does seem that some depict male-male sex and relationships, while others show trans or non-binary people!
If you want to learn more, check out our podcast on queerness in Moche ceramics!
What can I say, I love Blood Angels ❤ And I'm glad to know it's mutual because they come to my aid whenever I feel down and want to bleed inks on marker paper and mentally rave to 70s synthesizers.
And big thanks to Soyuzmultfilm for the amazing animated short inspired by Moche/Mochica mythology. It's so visually stunning and trippy and more importantly it shows proper research of the source material.
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