Bottle, Audiencias with Figures 14th-15th century Chimú This bottle is a unique example of an architectural vessel in silver from ancient Peru. Echoing the ancient stirrup-spout form first seen in Cupisnique ceramics perhaps two thousand years earlier, the body of the vessel is in the form of two audiencias, a type of architectural structure known from Chan Chan, the capital of the Chimú Empire. This great Andean desert city flourished on Perus North Coast, near what is now the modern city of Trujillo in the Moche Valley, for some five hundred years before the Chimú were conquered by the Incas around 1470 A.D. The core of the city was composed of ten monumental mud-brick compounds thought to be the palaces of the Chimú rulers. Most likely built sequentially by succeeding rulers, the compounds combined administrative, ceremonial, and domestic functions, but they ultimately became the funerary monuments of rulers, their descendants, and their retainers. This bottle, made of pieces of si