7.3186°S, 79.5822°W.
Pacatnamu is a coastal urban and ceremonial complex on a bluff above the Jequetepeque River mouth in northern Peru, occupied from the Moche period through the Chimu and Inca eras, roughly 200 to 1532 CE. The site covers about 150 hectares and contains more than fifty adobe pyramids, plazas, walled compounds, and cemeteries enclosed by a defensive perimeter wall. The Christopher Donnan and Guillermo Cock excavations of the 1980s recovered the Pacatnamu burial cluster — the dismembered remains of fourteen young men in a sand-filled trench, dated to the Moche V phase and interpreted as a single sacrificial event. Earlier German Heinrich Brüning collections from the site populated the Hamburg Museum für Völkerkunde in the early 20th century. The platform pyramids were built of small rectangular adobes, each compound likely controlled by a distinct kin group.
Pacatnamu's bluff edge drops in a sheer face to the Pacific surf below.