Cerro Sechin

9.4658°S, 78.2528°W.

Cerro Sechín in the Casma Valley, Áncash Region, Peru — a small platform structure built approximately 1600 BCE, part of the larger Sechín Complex of Initial Period sites alongside Sechín Alto and Sechín Bajo. Original base 51 metres per side; original height 10 metres on three terraces. The structure is famous for the Sechín Frieze — a relief programme of more than 400 carved stone slabs set into the building's outer walls, depicting dismembered human warriors, severed heads, intestines, eyes torn from sockets, and arms and legs separated from torsos in extreme anatomical detail. The frieze is the earliest documented depiction of warfare and battlefield mortality in Andean art and one of the most graphic surviving from any pre-Columbian culture. Excavated by Julio C. Tello in 1937 and continuously by Peruvian missions since. The interpretation of the imagery — historical battle commemoration, ritual sacrifice, mythological narrative, or political warning — has been debated for nearly a century without resolution.

A small platform pyramid covered in four hundred carved stone slabs of dismembered bodies, in a building four thousand years old whose meaning is still being argued.