The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Good evening. I'm Elizabeth Farnsworth. Jim Lehrer is on vacation. On the NewsHour tonight the fallout from two North Korean diplomats' defections, the dangers in some diet drugs, a David Gergen dialogue about what make extraordinary minds, and an exhibit of art from ancient Peru, it all follows our summary of the news this Wednesday. NEWS SUMMARY

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: North Korea suspended missile proliferation talks scheduled today with the United States. A North Korean official at the United Nations said his country was responding to yesterday's announcement the United States was sheltering two defecting Korean diplomats. He said North Korean ambassador to Egypt, Chung Sung Gil, and his brother were criminals and should be returned. The scuttled talks were aimed at curbing weapons sales by North Korea to countries such as Iran and Syria. In Washington, State Department Spokesman James Rubin was asked about the link between the defections and the suspended talks.

JAMES RUBIN, State Department Spokesman: Obviously, it's connected, and we regard the decision as disappointing. We believe that these talks are in the national interests of both sides. Stopping proliferation is a goal that should serve both our interests and their interests. It's a natural follow-on to the successful negotiation of the nuclear framework agreement that stopped their nuclear program. And we would like these talks to be rescheduled.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We'll have more on the story right after the News Summary. In the Middle East today Israel lifted its 28-day blockade of the West Bank town of Bethlehem, which had prevented 60,000 residents from leaving or getting to jobs. The blockade has also barred tourists from visiting the biblical city, sparking local and international protests. Israeli troops sealed off the West Bank and the Gaza Strip following the July 30th double suicide bombing in a Jerusalem market that killed 16 people. Though Bethlehem is now open, the West Bank and Gaza remain closed. Police arrested a Libyan man wanted for the 1986 bombing of a Berlin discotheque. Two U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman were killed then. Two hundred and thirty were injured, many of them U.S. military personnel. Musbah Abulgasem Eter had been sought on a German arrest warrant and will be extradited. German authorities said Eter was a former member of Libya's secret service. The United States blamed Libya for the terrorist attack and responded with an air strike that killed 15 people, including the adopted daughter of Libyan leader Gaddafi. Former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was indicted today. A federal grand jury charged him with 39 counts of soliciting and accepting gifts from large food companies. Espy, a former Mississippi congressman, is accused of taking $35,000 in gifts, trips, and favors, while serving as Agriculture Secretary from 1993 to 1994. Independent Counsel Donald Smaltz said Espy also tried to impede the federal investigation. Smaltz spoke to reporters in Virginia. DONALD SMALTZ, Independent Counsel: The indictment also alleges that after Mr. Espy's receipt of gratuities when he was questioned about it, he attempted to conceal his actions by lying to USDA Inspector General representatives, by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and by lying to the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Espy has denied any wrongdoing. In business news today Fidelity Magellan, the world's largest mutual fund, will stop accepting new investors next month. After September 30th, only current shareholders and companies that offer the Magellan Fund as part of their retirement portfolios will be able to make further investments. A Fidelity spokesperson in Boston said the action would allow Magellan's assets to grow at reasonable levels. Some market analysts have criticized the $63 billion fund for being too large to be managed effectively. The Food & Drug Administration today stepped up its warnings about the dangers of so-called Fen-Phen diet drugs. The FDA said patients taking a combination of Fenfluramine and Phentermine needed to be aware of the risks of serious heart valve disease. The agency called on the drug's manufacturers to stress the risks in labels and package inserts, even though the cause-effect relationship between the drug and valve abnormalities has not been conclusively established. We'll have more on the story later in the program. Also ahead, North Korean defectors, extraordinary minds, and amazing art. FOCUS - DEFECTOR DAMAGE

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: First tonight, North Korea responds to the defection of two of its diplomats to the United States. Charles Krause has the story.

CHARLES KRAUSE: The two defectors are Chang Sung Gil, who was North Korea's ambassador to Egypt and his brother, Chang Sung Ho, who was a North Korea trade counselor based in Paris. Yesterday, the State Department confirmed that the two brothers had defected to the United States and had been granted temporary asylum. Late last night North Korea's Communist government responded by suspending talks scheduled for today in New York on arms proliferation. Today the State Department said it hopes North Korea will change its mind. Joining us now to discuss this latest turn of events is Han Park, director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues at the University of Georgia, and James Lilley, a former CIA official, who served as U.S. Ambassador to South Korea from 1986 to 1989. He's now the director of the Institute for Global Chinese Affairs at the University of Maryland. Gentlemen, welcome. Mr. Ambassador, tell me, there have been reports that these two defectors are likely to be of great interest to U.S. intelligence. How important are they?

JAMES LILLEY, Former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea: I don't think we know yet. Right now, we're going through the preliminary process of debriefing and authentication. And this means getting them off, testing them, cross-checking them, seeing if their information is good, what their access is. Did this vice foreign minister and ambassador to the key post in Egypt really have access to the secret arms shipments? Does he know about their plans toward South Korea? Does he know what the military is up to? Does he know about the power structure? These have to be determined. We don't know this yet.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Mr. Park, how embarrassing or how damaging are these defections for the regime in North Korea?

HAN PARK, University of Georgia: I think it would be very damaging. Following the defection by party Secretary Huang Jan Yup some six months ago, this kind of defection is very damaging because North Korea is alleging that these diplomats are criminals who have committed crimes prior to their defection, and the United States, in effect, has to their mind provided protection and an asylum to criminals. So this is not only embarrassment on the part of the government outside but within the country, once they decided these two diplomats were criminals they have to follow through their process, whatever legal process they may have, otherwise, as they put it, a great insult on the system.

CHARLES KRAUSE: What is your evaluation of these charges? In other words, do you think that this business about them being criminals has some validity, or is it simply a kind of character assassination after the fact?

HAN PARK: I think it would be very hard. At this point no one knows for sure. But psychologically it seems to me that North Koreans will not have a whole lot of incentives in making up such false stories when they need clearly food aid and improvement of relations with the United States. So this kind of statement will only hurt their hungry stomachs. So making other stories like this is very unlikely--in view of the fact that when Huang Jan Yup defected, they tried to put it on the back burner, and very low feed, and they did not respond any--with any policy measures. So I think there might be some validity behind this story, given the psychology of North Koreans.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Amb. Lilley, what's your take on that?

JAMES LILLEY: I don't think Dr. Park has it right at all. It's a very standard procedure for the North Koreans immediately to try to discredit any defector. In this particular case, they don't know what this man knows. It is their objective when they went into these talks to delay them. And what they looked for is a pretext to delay them. And they tried to set up a situation where they can demand further concessions for us because the claim is that we had insulted us--them by harboring a criminal. They say that for a purpose. They try to put us on the defensive. So if you want us to come back into talks that we don't want to go back into, you have to give us a concession. They do the same thing with President Kim Young Sam, as Dr. Park knows very well. We will not enter into North-South dialogue because three and a half years ago President Kim Young Sam said something derogatory about our great leader Kim Il Sung. They didn't want to go into the talks anyway. This is a standard technique they've used, as Dr. Park knows very well, for 46 years.

HAN PARK: Except the fact that North Korea right now needs massive amount of food aid, and they know that the United States has the key to the alleviation of their food crisis.

JAMES LILLEY: I don't think you're right on that one either because the Chinese have the key. The Chinese have given them one million tons last year, which is five, ten times as much as anybody else. The key lies in China. You know that.

HAN PARK: Well, the--I think it's proper thing that the United States should have done--and that is at least to look into these charges. I don't know. In fact, these crimes prior to the defection, or afterwards they made up the story. I think that's something that we have to investigate very carefully. As far as the importance of the United States and North Korea, in the short run, as well as in the long run. I think China is not nearly as important as it used to be during the Cold War era, for North Korea development in reaching out. I think there are many countries that will follow the course of America, the leadership of America, Japan and other Western European countries, whereas, China is sort of isolated as North Korean ally, if you will.

CHARLES KRAUSE: All right. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, changing--turning a bit here, were you as surprised as the administration apparently was about the fact--the strong reaction of suspending the talks that were scheduled for today?

JAMES LILLEY: I think it's absolutely predictable; they were going to do this. And I said this publicly yesterday; that they would have to cancel the talks; that we had a tremendous advantage of getting this defector in, they don't know what he knows, they don't know what he's told us. What they try to do is to blame it on us, as Dr. Park says; it's our fault, because we take a criminal; therefore, we owe them something. We have to give them something to come back into the talks. They've been doing this for 46 years, and I know that Dr. Park knows perfectly wel

DR. MICHAEL FRIEDMAN: We don't have precise figures. We know that some 18 million prescriptions were written in 1996.

MARGARET WARNER: For--

DR. MICHAEL FRIEDMAN: For these drugs.

MARGARET WARNER: The Phen-Fen and the Redux?

DR. MICHAEL FRIEDMAN: And the Phentermine. So all three of these medications have been widely prescribed in the United States. We don't have good information about the number of patients who are currently taking the medicines, but we're gathering some of that information.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, given everything we just saw, these three different potential dangers, why not just ban these drugs outright, or as the New England Journal editorialized today, at least impose a moratorium on them?

DR. MICHAEL FRIEDMAN: It's very important to note that when these drugs are used in accordance with the labeled instructions, the number of side effects from pulmonary hypertension or from the valve abnormality are extremely rare. When these medications are used outside of those labeled indications at a higher dosage, for a longer period of time, or in combination with one another, then these side effects are seen more frequently. We're looking very intently at this. We're gathering information to determine which populations might be particularly sensitive to these side effects, which populations might be helped most by these medications. But we've had very few, if any, valve abnormalities in patients who have used the products in an appropriately- labeled fashion. Even in the label indication it says to use these medications only for a short period of time, some few weeks, and in conjunction with dietary restrictions.

MARGARET WARNER: But we saw--the graph showed that even some patients who'd used it a very short time had increased risk of this pulmonary hypertension.

DR. MICHAEL FRIEDMAN: That's correct. There is an increased risk from pulmonary hypertension. We recommend that patients and physicians think very carefully about these serious and sometimes irreversible side effects and decide whether the medical value of losing weight is part of an overall program may be of such benefit to that patient that the patient and the physician choose this course of action in an informed, thoughtful way.

MARGARET WARNER: So do you think the use of diet drugs in this country has gotten out of hand?

DR. MICHAEL FRIEDMAN: Well, to the extent that there are patients who don't meet the standards that have been described for Dux Fenfluramine, Redux, we know that some patients have been treated who don't--who are not excessively obese, who do not have heart disease, or diabetes or hypertension, and we think it's inappropriate for those patients to be receiving that medication.

MARGARET WARNER: But given society's obsession with thinness, do you--what makes you think that patients who go to their doctors and say for cosmetic reasons they want to lose ten pounds, fifteen pounds, are going to be essentially frightened away by these warnings?

DR. MICHAEL FRIEDMAN: I think we depend upon the informed view of patients and physicians to make these sort of choices. I think that there may be better ways we can predict which patients may be at higher risk. We want to certainly look at that. But in the meantime we know that these treatments have relatively limited value in the label indications; in the label package insert for these medications, it said that these have limited value and only in conjunction with caloric restriction. In that way we think it can be valuable.

MARGARET WARNER: So you do think there's a tradeoff here?

DR. MICHAEL FRIEDMAN: There's absolutely a tradeoff, and each individual patient and physician needs to best decide.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thank you, Dr. Friedman, very much.

DR. MICHAEL FRIEDMAN: Thank you.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, extraordinary mines, and amazing art. DIALOGUE

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor at large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages Howard Gardner, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and author of "Extraordinary Minds: Portraits of Four Exceptional Individuals and an Examination of Our Own Extraordinariness."

DAVID GERGEN: Howard, you've been writing about extraordinary people now for 10 years. You're a development psychologist. Why write about extraordinary people?

HOWARD GARDNER, Author, "Extraordinary Minds": First of all because they're fascinating. And to be able to study somebody who really has made a difference in the history of the world is a privilege. But I also am trying to do more than just describe individuals. I'm trying to understand the phenomenon of extraordinariness in general. It's as if I were an anthropologist or a naturalist and I discovered these funny individuals with names like Freud and Marx and Gandhi and Beethoven and Mozart. And I said they're not only remarkable, but are there certain patterns that sort of run through all these people and not perhaps can we make everybody into an Einstein. That's unlikely. But what can ordinary folks learn from people who really have made a difference in the history of the world?

DAVID GERGEN: Now, in this book you focused on four individuals. You focused on Mozart, on Freud, Virginia Woolf, and also Gandhi. Why these four?

HOWARD GARDNER: Because they are representatives of what I think are the four principal species, you might say, of extraordinariness, carrying the naturalist metaphor forward. Mozart I call a master. He is someone who does brilliantly what other people are doing in a domain, in this case music, but unlike Freud, whom I call a maker, Mozart had no desire really to create new genres, to do stuff that nobody else had done before. He just wanted to do magnificent works of music. Freud as a maker was always trying to test the limits, always trying to create something new. He went through one discipline after another, never happy until he finally created his own called psychoanalysis. He made the rules. He decided who would be a psychoanalyst. He was much more like a composer like Stravinsky or Schoenberg, who earlier in this century really created wholly new musics, or Elvis or Beatles, if you want to use a popular kind of metaphor. Then there are two other kinds of extraordinariness which have to do with human beings. One which I call the introspector is someone who really studies his or her own condition as a human being and tries to understand it very deeply. And Virginia Wolf, the novelist, is my introspector because not only did she introspect about what it was like to be a woman, to live in England early in the century, but to my mind, even more impressively, she introspected about what "conscious" is like, what does it mean to be conscious of something? And her books try to capture what we call this dream of consciousness. And the final extraordinary person, also involved with human beings, but in this case with other human beings, is Gandhi. I call Gandhi an influencer because Gandhi may have spent time thinking about himself, but basically what he was doing was he was trying to change the beliefs and the actions of millions and millions of people, initially in South Africa, then in India, and ultimately he had effects all over the world and in this country in the civil rights movement, in Russia, in China. I think Nelson Mandela is inconceivable without the example of Gandhi and South Africa and India.

DAVID GERGEN: Well, now, as a development psychologist, you obviously look closely at the early years of childhood and what impact they have on an individual. Were extraordinary people born, or are they made?

HOWARD GARDNER: I think the only way in which extraordinary people are born is that some of them had an easy time learning things. Mozart had parents in a milieu which encouraged music-making, but he also learned music very easily. I don't think that I could have been a Mozart. But other than being able to master a domain or an area of expertise relatively quickly, I think extraordinary people are really made. They're made in part by their ambition, in part by their times, in part by luck, and in part by where the particular domain is at a historical moment. Einstein, for example, came at exactly the right time, when all the assumptions of physics, which had survived for two centuries under Newton were coming into question. Everybody knew it didn't quite work, but he was the guy who could see thingsin a new way, in part because of what I would say he had a particular blend of intelligence. He was able to think spatially about issues that people had often thought about just mathematically. If Einstein had been born 50 years earlier or 50 years later, it's quite likely he would not have been an outstanding physicist, and certainly would not have been as revolutionary as he was, being--coming into his prime at the beginning of the century.

DAVID GERGEN: One of the interesting points you make is about the classical story about the wound and the bow and how that applies to extraordinary people.

HOWARD GARDNER: All of us have things that go wrong in our lives. Sometimes we have so many things that go wrong that we can't deal with it, and we just give up. Sometimes we shield them out; we ignore them. What people who are extraordinary often do is they have a wound-- they have something which is very painfully--either physically, you know, a disease--or psychologically, very, very difficult experiences they've gone through--but rather than ignoring them or be defeated by them, they wrestle with them, and they say, well, what can I learn from this. I think there are three lessons of extraordinary people. And the ones I find actually the most inspiring I call framing. And framing means when something goes wrong--and all of us have things go wrong--can you turn it into an opportunity? Jeanne Monet, the French economist whom I studied in some depth, said, "I regard every defeat as an opportunity." That's a prototypical framing thing to do. You don't give up. You say, "What can I learn from this?". And here's, I think, where the rest of us can really learn from these people, particularly if we are teachers or coaches or talking to ourselves. When things go bad, don't ignore it, don't be defeated by it, say, "What can I learn from it?". You worked closely with Richard Nixon, a very complicated person. I think it's no accident that a book that he wrote early in his career-- "Six Crises"--was a confrontation of what happens when something goes against you. Are you mobilized by it? Do you learn from it? You make it into a strength, or you're crippled by it. Nixon, for all his wounds so to speak, knew how to make them into strengths, into great paradox, which historians will be scratching their heads about, it's when things were going the best--in 1972, after he had won everything, that's when he undid himself.

DAVID GERGEN: He was best dealing with adversity. He had very great trouble dealing with triumph. But Nixon also illustrates, as do these other extraordinary people, the other two lessons. Let's talk just a moment about those.

HOWARD GARDNER: Reflecting and leveraging. Reflecting means spending time thinking about what you're doing, taking stock, taking walks, taking baths, keeping journals, anything which allows you to have a distance from your enterprise. Leveraging means figuring out what your strengths are and really pushing them. Everybody whom I've studied--the twenty-five or thirty extraordinary people--all have areas of amazing weakness. But they're not defeated by them. They, instead, say, "What's my strength, and what's the niche that I can better fill than any other niche" and they really pushed those strengths. And other people can help them with things they're not good at. So if you have a combination of reflecting, figuring out your strengths, and pushing them, and when things go badly not giving up but essentially learning from it, being energized, then I certainly think that you, as an individual, or your kids, if you're thinking about it in terms of teaching or parents are more likely to be at least, you might say, if not capital "e" extraordinary more extraordinary than they would be under other circumstances.

DAVID GERGEN: I wanted to ask you one last point, in addition to those three lessons. All three--all four of the people here in this book seem to become masters of enormous diligence in their fields They worked hard at what they did.

HOWARD GARDNER: One of the things that surprised me when I began to study people is often they come from quite bourgeois backgrounds, ones where their parents may not smother them with love but where work and following a calling is very important, and they're not afraid to spend up to 10 years mastering something and then working for 10 more years on a problem. And one thing I worry about a great deal nowadays is between the speed with which things change and the multiplicity of opportunities which even less affluent people have, the notion of sticking to something long enough to really master it, and then to be able to take it the distance so you can become a maker, so you can go beyond it, that's becoming more elusive. And I think we need to, in a sense, go against the time and create spaces for individuals to spend the time needed to master.

DAVID GERGEN: Dr. Howard Gardner, thank you very much.

HOWARD GARDNER: Thank you, David. FINALLY - SPIRIT OF ANCIENT PERU

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Finally tonight, the spirit of ancient Peru. Spencer Michels reports from San Francisco on a unique collection of art.

SPENCER MICHELS: Most people heading for this show at San Francisco's De Young Museum probably thought it was about the Incas. It's the Incas who surely are Peru's best-known pre-Colombian people. But this exhibit was out to demonstrate that Peru's past is far richer than that; that it's crowded with complex and mysterious cultures going back 3,000 years, that produced intriguing riches. For most of us even the names are unfamiliar: the Chavin living in Peru's Northern Highlands; the Cupisnique, on the Pacific Coast; the Huari in the Central Highlands; Gallinazo and Moche on the North Coast. Most of these cultures and their artifacts are just beginning to come to light in a series of recent archaeological digs. And extraordinary things are emerging: relief murals a hundred feet long, carved in adobe, their meaning still not fully understood; tombs filled with buried pots, always placed there in multiples of five. Why? No one knows. These people left no written records. Nevertheless, what they did leave, buried in graves, contains fascinating clues about the lives and beliefs of these early cultures. The show contains ornate jewelry and headdresses of gold, pieces the Spanish Conquistadors missed when they raided Peru. There are also some dazzlingly complex weavings. But the true stars are the ceramics, produced in huge numbers by all of these cultures. To tour this show with an archaeologist like Stanford's John Rick is to enter into the beliefs and even the mental atmosphere of peoples who vanished hundreds, even thousands, of years ago.

SPENCER MICHELS: With more than a dozen cultures over this 3,000 years, is there anything tying them together, or are they all completely separate?

JOHN RICK, Stanford Archaeologist: There's a great deal of continuity across that time. You see themes such as the puma, the feline, which seems to be very important throughout. Most have ritual significance, some from the jungle, such as the monkey you see here, and then some very obvious river and probably sea creatures.

SPENCER MICHELS: You know, monkeys don't usually sit on fish, but that's what this looks like. Is there a story here?

JOHN RICK: Undoubtedly, there is, and it's probably not a very direct or natural one. What we've learned in looking at these objects is that many of the things that are represented, even if they're from the natural world, probably represent something that is rather unnatural, that is, specific ideas about nature, myths about origins, and various other beliefs.

SPENCER MICHELS: Here's an object of someone hitting a drum or a stone. It's hard to tell which. What do you make of this?

JOHN RICK: Yes. Definitely that's an Indian drum, and it probably represents, I guess, a ritual situation, music being produced. The Andes only had percussion, woodwind instruments, so they were not--they didn't have the full range of instruments as we would know them. But drums were very important in a ritual context.

SPENCER MICHELS: Realism winds in and out of these artifacts like a subplot. This early figure from the Chavin period combines two faces--animal and human--in a single head. Its frightening power was apparently used in religious rituals in which men seemed to take power from the animal kingdom. Other ceramics from the culture called Moche are so realistic that it's possible to identify them right down to the species: a squash, an owl, snails, or a toad. It's tempting to see these as purely documentary. But Prof. Rick believes almost all Peruvian art has religious sources.

JOHN RICK: They're not showing us everything. And what they show is repetitive and quite often is in the context of a series of very specific actions or their objects. So it looks like they're abstracting certain elements out of nature and out of their culture which they want to put on display, which are probably of great political and ritual significance. And there are suspicions that these are fragments of a mythology, and they're symbolizing them in many cases by just one element out of the total repertoire of actors and objects, which might have been present in those scenes.

SPENCER MICHELS: What do you make out of this amazing depiction of a lobster on some kind of a ball?

JOHN RICK: Well, probably the lobster is a river crayfish from the coastal rivers of Peru, but it's doing--it's certainly involved in some sort of a very different type of act, with its claws surrounding a flower-like object and around to its side are a series of painted animals, which are probably fish. In many cases you'll see this same pattern over and over again. And you begin to pick up the consistency in the font patterns of the Moche. If they saw a crayfish, themselves, they probably would think of a scene that involved perhaps a flower, perhaps some fish. And that may represent a much larger context, political action or religious scene, something of the nature.

SPENCER MICHELS: Are you a little frustrated that you can't really understand it and get to the bottom of it?

JOHN RICK: Well, frustration probably isn't the word. Usually it's more of a challenge. And it's that consistency, it's piecing that together that's one of the rewarding parts of Moche archaeology.

SPENCER MICHELS: The rewards of Peruvian archaeology played a big role in the life of this man--Rafael Larco Hoyo--a wealthy sugar grower who was also one of the pioneers of Peruvian archaeology. Over 40 years he acquired thousands of artifacts, some of them found on his own plantations, buried in graves. He sponsored his own digs, wrote scholarly books, even built a museum in Lima to house his vast collection. A small portion of that collection was the source for this American exhibit. Through his pioneering research he built a time line that helps today's archaeologists date their findings. This deer figure, for example, came from the same era as the more realistic animals like the lobster. But instead of realism, it blends human and animal elements.

JOHN RICK: Well, in all probability, it represents a deer that is not just a deer. It strikes you as a deer because the face and the antlers are so realistic, but when you work down below the head, and it all goes awry. There's a rope around the neck, which most deer don't tend to have. It has clear human hands; genitalia are human. The cross-legged position it's sitting in is absolutely human. And this is directly analogous to the position Moche will show prisoners sitting in--a rope around their neck, probably waiting to be sacrificed. There may be a deer-enemy equivalence going on; that you could show a deer, and it really means these are our enemies, and we treat them like deer perhaps. You know, we hunt them and we kill them, and we consume them.

SPENCER MICHELS: Themes of capture and human sacrifice show up often in Moche art and provide perhaps the best clues to the major rituals of their life. In one bottle a human prisoner sits like a deer with a rope around his neck, his hands bound behind his back. One ceramic shows the whole scene as a group of sculptured figures. Yet, even here educated guesswork is needed.

JOHN RICK: It's a great scene that amply demonstrates that the Moche society had a major element of military power in it. What you're seeing here is the procession of a captive, bound by the neck. In all likelihood, the prisoner is being led forward by the person holding his neck rope in front. And they seem to be going between paired individuals with hands outstretched. So it appears to be not only the movement of a prisoner but there's something ritualistic about it, something to be observed, as well as controlled by these lateral figures.

SPENCER MICHELS: What happens to this man with a rope around his neck?

JOHN RICK: If we look at a number of finely-painted pots where you get much more graphic information, you'll frequently see a rope-tied prisoner being bled from the neck--a number of individuals cutting through the neck with sacrificial knives--bleeding captives' blood into goblets. And then in later scenes, the contents of the goblets are being consumed by the leadership.

SPENCER MICHELS: It sounded like it was a pretty violent society.

JOHN RICK: Well, it may have been, but we have to keep in mind this is an early state. And early states are based on the concept that they can wield force against their citizenry to obtain compliance with state dictates. But once you get the people enough into that mind set, once, in effect, they're domesticated and respond to the state appropriately, then the state probably won't, in fact, have to use force any more than our own one does today.

SPENCER MICHELS: Most human figures in the show are highly stylized. Yet, 500 years into the Moche area, about 550 A.D., they started to produce a series of heads so detailed, so realistic, that there's no question they portrayed living individuals. The question is why.

JOHN RICK: These aren't any human beings. They're almost undoubtedly leaders. I can't help but believe that we're dealing with the representation of an individual in power in which their face symbolizes the political system that they had, and, therefore, they've become a symbol of the state, themselves.

SPENCER MICHELS: In other words, he doesn't need a puma or a jaguar to keep him in power?

JOHN RICK: Exactly. No longer does this person have to draw on nature.

SPENCER MICHELS: So this is a real portrait of a real leader, warts and all?

JOHN RICK: Exactly. Many times we'll see disfiguration on the faces of individuals. In this case you can get the clear sense that this face is not being portrayed perfectly symmetrically. And it gives an expression of the mouth, for instance--you don't know quite what the person will do next--but it's so life-like that you really feel like that mouth may just move into a new--a new facial formation while you watch it.

SPENCER MICHELS: And when you look at all of this art and realize that it's an area of the world and a history of the world that most people don't even know about, it sort of tells you something about it all.

JOHN RICK: Yes. The message--it's what's so wonderful about Peruvian archaeology. The message does come through time. So much has been preserved. And these cultures were so productive of art. The amount to learn still is immense, but we have this possibility now to reach across time and make sense out of these people.

SPENCER MICHELS: The known and the unknown intertwine. Perhaps that's the key to understanding the powerful appeal of these works with their sophisticated craftsmanship and their haunting imagery, imagery so vivid it seems to shout out at us but in a language just beyond our reach.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The exhibit closes this weekend in San Francisco and moves to Knoxville, Tennessee Museum of Art on September 26th. RECAP

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Again, the major stories of this Wednesday, North Korea suspended talks with the United States about North Korean missile sales to Iran and Syria. Police in Rome arrested a Libyan man wanted for the 1986 terrorist bombing of a Berlin discotheque in which two U.S. soldiers were killed. And former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was indicted on 39 counts of soliciting and accepting gifts from large food companies. We'll see you on-line and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Elizabeth Farnsworth. Thank you and good night.