Around AD 600, the centre of Moche power shifted from the Moche valley to the Lambayeque valley in the north. A large ceremonial centre of Pampa Grande became the new Moche capital.
Significant changes in style and organization indicate that a new group of rulers had seized power. The city contained substantial areas of craft workshops, manufacturing cotton textiles, copper artefacts and other goods, areas of housing for commoners and large residential compounds for the elite.
These were all clustered around the vast Huaca Fortaleza complex. Although this followed Andean tradition in being a tiered platform mound, it differed in both its method of construction and its function to the conventional pyramid mounds of earlier times.
The Huaca Fortaleza dominated a massive fortified complex, entry to which was strictly controlled. Within this were a great number of storage rooms, where it is assumed the rulers stored the goods they received in taxes.
A workshop within the complex manufactured artefacts from the extremely prestigious Spondylus seashells imported from Ecuador, an activity that was presumably important enough to require direct elite control.
The end of Pampa Grande, around AD 700, was dramatic and sudden. The city was burnt down and its inhabitants moved elsewhere.
