This article presents a look at the ancient Sicán culture, a Peruvian culture older than the Incas who made unprecedented use of gold and other metals. Old ceremonial masks and knives are popular symbols of pre-Hispanic Peruvian culture. Examples adorn the covers of books on Peru and serve as emblems for some Peruvian institutions. These precious metal artifacts are often attributed, even by knowledgeable persons, to the Incas or to their coastal rivals, the Chimu. Yet many of them are not Incan or Chimu at all: they were created much earlier by the Sicán culture, which was centered in the Lambayeque region of northern Peru and flourished from the ninth to the 14th centuries. The Middle Sicán era, between 900 and 1100 C.E., produced enormous quantities of precious metal artifacts, many showing extraordinarily high craftsmanship. We and our colleagues from several disciplines have scrutinized the metalwork from one Middle Sicán trove in an attempt to reconstruct the technology and organization of precious metal production and to define the meaning of those products within the culture.