At the center of Margaret Jackson's book is the examination of a large Moche ceramics production facility at Cerro Mayal, Peru, carefully sited to take advantage of sea-land breezes to support firing ceramics. Detected with ground penetrating radar, the site includes kilns, molds, and finished ceramics, associated with fabrication tools, and staging areas. This fascinating complex specialized in producing large quantities of figurines, beads, food services, and pendant images that depict the Priestess or Goddess (pp. 60-2) and others associated with her (pp. 160-1). The Moche operators clearly organized production far beyond the lone artisan level by using specialized techniques and a thoroughgoing decomposition of tasks (p. 50) for manufacturing precise copies of religious imagery to supply a consuming public. This expands on Jackson's earlier report on Cerro Mayal (pp. 159 - 173, Joanne Pillsbury, Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru (Studies in the History of Art Series)).

From these facts of material production and distribution, the author ventures into several semantic thickets to discuss theoretic approaches that might clarify the systems of symbols and signs embodied by the rich Moche imagery. Jackson examines a handful of analytic techniques for apprehending the codes that express the meanings that members of this alien society molded into devotional objects for their fellow citizens. Alas, she never quite returns to her original path to apply these semantic techniques to thoroughly construe the meanings of the standardized figurines. For example, one chapter discusses the significance of various markings on the outsides of the ceramic molds. While some are registration marks for joining the molds, and others indicate, like graphic labels, aspects of the figures that the molds produce, there are a few that seem to be abstract signs intended to convey meaning within the community of ceramists like a kind of proto-alphabetic script.

One intriguing path that Jackson briefly explores is to describe the architectural contexts of some exciting sculptural imagery brought to light since 1990 but woefully under reported. The sculptures are located in the bowels of two massive building complexes, one at Huaca Cao Viejo -- near Cerro Mayal -- and the other at Huaca de la Luna. Both are generally thought to be temples. Each complex harbors a small enclosure whose plaster and stucco walls are covered with spectacular carved or molded multicolored friezes that appear quite similar in style. However, the few photos are taken from afar and are indistinct (pp.32-3,plates 3 and 5). They depict dozens of interacting figures whose forms differ strikingly from those of the famous fine line ceramic paintings and from the figurines associated with the Goddess. Perhaps they embody formative elements of Moche iconography or contrasting subject matter to the funerary graphics, but they are susceptible to the same modes of graphic semantic analysis.

"The Moche of the North Coast of Peru (ca. A.D. 100-800) provide an excellent example of an ancient American culture that developed an elaborate, systematized pictorial code." Jackson, a fellow associated with Stanford University, uses the latest research, methodological tools, and ideas in pre-Columbian pictography to extensively explore this "example" of the fascinating type of pictorial language. While not going so far as to proffer new or revolutionary perspectives, the book records and pictures a wealth of recent archaeological finds. With this, Jackson also explains and analyzes details of these and relates such details to aspects of the Moche culture. The work is thus a fresh look at this major, highly-developed pre-Columbian South American culture.

The Moche preceded both the Incas of mountainous Peru and the Aztecs of Central America. Jackson's study is so broad and intricate that it implicitly presents a picture of the major native civilizations of Central and South America. The Moche did not exert influence on these later civilizations from conquest or expansion. Rather, the Moche represent one of the earliest highly-developed pictorial languages related to the particular type of native cultures that grew in the southern Americas. That similarities among these cultures, some quite distant from one another and separated by centuries, are not explained by conquest or expansion or migration opens up intriguing questions about roots, attributes, circumstances, and histories of the different civilizations.

The archaeological finds are mostly ceramics. The author concentrates on these while at times referring to other artifacts. The complex pictures of the ceramics are not decorative (as with Greek vases for the most part even though many of the pictures represent mythical figures), but is instead a means of communication. The Moche "ritual-use ceramics [along with] monumental arts, in the form of imposing architecture [e. g., pyramids] with oversized murals and friezes...played critical parts in the society's communicative strategy." One evidence of the integral relationship between the Moche pictorial language and the culture is changes the language underwent as the culture underwent fundamental changes for unknown reasons. The identification between the language and the culture ebbed away as the pictorializations became "increasingly repetitive, geometric, and abstract" as Moche culture moved into what is known as its Chimu phase about 800AD.

Jackson's absorbing and rewarding study gives a good foundation in Native American studies which carries beyond its particular topic. While the material is scholarly, meticulous, and scientific in parts, the related more anthropological and occasional sociological-like material meet the interests of general readers.