This piece of pottery is a burial object, so it comes from a religious context. It shows a fisherman with a very large lobster trap on which a lobster-like animal is sitting. Since lobsters come from warm waters, they are not normally found on the Peruvian coast. The Humboldt Current, which flows from south to north off the Peruvian coast, is a cold-water current and one of the world's most fish-rich waters. It is the most important food source for the development of Peruvian coastal cultures. This is how the first city in America, Caral, came into being as a trading centre between the coast and the highlands. Dried fish and fishmeal were exchanged for cotton from the hinterland of the coast. Camelid fibres from the highlands were traded between coast and highlands long before the Incas. Only during the El Niño phenomenon, which occurs every few years on the Pacific coast of Peru, does warm water, which is normally only found on the Ecuadorian and Colombian Pacific coasts, flow south, displacing the cold water of the Humboldt Current. With it, warm water fish, lobsters and the spondylus mollusc appear on the Peruvian coast. During the El Niño phenomenon it also rains in one of the driest deserts in the world. In the ceramics of the Chimú culture there are many indications of this climatic anomaly, such as lobsters and large warm water fish.