Thursday, December 13, 2007

No Cunnilingus for Moches Men

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.
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.
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 American public first became aware of huacos eróticos in 1954, when Indiana University's Dr. Alfred Kinsey -- author of the famous Kinsey Reports on human sexual behavior traveled to Lima to investigate Peru's archaeological dirty secret.
The Moche artifacts, Kinsey wrote, were ``the most frank and detailed document of sexual customs ever left by an ancient people.(click for more)

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