A weird, comma-shaped fruit is often to be seen “floating over the soldiers marching off to be sacrificed or flying priests” in the artwork of the Moche, an agricultural people that frequented the coastal plain of northern Peru from A.D. 100 to 800. That’s been recognized since the 1930’s, when archaeologists gave it the name ulluchu — meaning “penis pepper” because of its shape — but without actually been able to say what the fruit was. Modern-day Peruvians just don’t recognize it, and botanists need more to go on for a scientific identification.
They got it recently when the actual remains of a fruit were found during excavation of the the tombs of Dos Cabezas in the ancient Moche city of Sipan. Ethnobotanists Rainer Bussmann and Douglas Sharon had been asking around for ulluchu for years:
“We would go to these markets and people would say, ‘We think we know what that is, but it’s not being sold here,'” said Sharon, the retired director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkley. “Well, one of the reasons it wasn’t being used is because the Ulluchu seems to show up during sacrifices. And no one is being sacrificed anymore.”
But armed with the physical specimens, desiccated as they were, Bussman, who works at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, eventually homed in on the genus Guarea, which is in the mahogany family, not the pepper.
“Rainer is a first-rate taxonomist,” Sharon said. “He studied every physical characteristic of these plants until he was absolutely certain we had it.”
Guarea seeds contain hallucinogenics and chemicals which raise blood pressure. Both would have been useful in sacrifices.
Bussmann, director of the garden’s William L. Brown Center for Plant Genetic Resources, plans to further study the plant’s chemistry and suspects it might have applications as a blood pressure and erectile dysfunction treatment.
The sacrificial soldiers in Moche artwork over which ulluchu fruits float often appear to have erections. Expect huge plantations to spring up in the Peruvian lowlands.