7 Was Huacas de Sican a Pilgrimage Center? Results from Compositional Analysis of Serving Vessels from the Great Plaza GO MATSUMOTO INTRODUCTION Sican Culture Sican (a.k.a. Lambayeque) is a prehispanic archaeologi- cal culture that flourished about 1,000 years ago centered in the Lambayeque complex (Figure 7.1). The people who developed the Sican culture emerged after the political demise of the preceding Mochica around AD 750-800 and persisted for over six centuries until conquered by the expanding Chimu Empire in 1375 (Shimada 2000). Sican chronology is divided into Early (AD 850-950), Middle (AD 950-1100), and Late (AD 1100-1375) periods based on ceramic, iconographic, and architectural features and changes (Shimada 1990:328, 348, Figures 18 and 29). It is widely accepted that Sican elites firmly established a powerful state by about AD 950 and built their political/ religious center (Huacas de Sican) within the modern-day Pomac Forest Historical Sanctuary in the mid-La Leche Valley, the area traditionally called Batan Grande. Archi- tecturally, Huacas de Sican centers around a dozen mon- umental structures and a large rectangular space called "Great Plaza" in the area of about 2 km 2, or 200 ha (ca. 1 [north-south) x 2 km [east-west]), with limited residen- tial areas for elites. This ceremonial core is surrounded on all four sides by residential zones, most likely occu- pied by non -elite general masses (Figure 7.2). It is inferred 59 that the state reached its height of prosperity during the Middle Sican period, establishing dominance over a 400 km stretch of the coast from the Chira Valley to the north to the Chicama Valley to the south (Segura and Shi- mada 2014; Shimada 2009a; also see Rucabado-Yong and Castillo Butters 2003; cf. Montenegro 2010; Sapp 2011). Recent studies have pointed to the multiethnic nature of the Sican society (e.g., Klaus 2003, 2009; Taylor 2002). Under Sican rule, the subordinate Mochica people appear to have been given a good degree of autonomy and had their cultural identity tolerated. Six Elite Lineages Hypothesis Based on his long- term resea rch primarily on Middle Sican society (Shimada 2009b), Shimada (2009a:53-56, 2014:73) characterizes Middle Sican leadership as strad- dling both secular and sacred domains and exercised by six elite lineages that competed and/ or allied at different times to gain and / or retain power. The six elite lineages are inferred to have been unified with the shared belief in the omnipotent, supreme Sican Deity. The political unifi- cation of the state seems to have been based on political and religious allegiance from the subordinate in return for pragmatic merits, rather than achieved by military conquest and coercion. Hardly any archaeological evi- dence of armed conflicts has been thus far reported (e.g.,