Tag: arqueologia

tlatollotl:

Feathered Panel

Date: A.D. 600–900

Geography: Peru, Churunga Valley

Culture: Wari

The discovery of an ancient burial or ceremonial site in the upriver region of the Churunga Valley, in far south Peru, received little attention in the turbulent world of 1943. Decades later, it would take two generations of Andean scholars to painstakingly piece together the puzzling story of this discovery, which included the largest and most spectacular find of Precolumbian Peruvian feather work to date.

Protected from decay by being rolled, placed into large ceramic jars, and buried in the arid soil, the cache included an estimated ninety-six panels, each densely covered with tens of thousands of small glossy macaw body feathers, primarily from the blue and yellow macaw (Ara ararauna). Although these panels were found in the dry western foothills of the Andes, the birds’ home is the Amazonian rainforest, far to the east. The effort required to secure such a mind-bogglingly large supply of either feathers or live birds suggests that colorful feathers were highly valued.

The panels are of roughly similar dimensions, and the majority feature alternating rectangles of blue and yellow feathers, which came from the macaw’s dorsal and ventral sides, respectively. The panels have a woven heading tape, and most also include braided cords that hang from the narrow sides. Although the cords suggest that these works were meant to be secured to some kind of structure, their actual function remains frustratingly illusive.

Christine Giuntini, Conservator, 2016

References
Bird, Junius B. 1958. Art of Ancient Peru: Selected Works from the Collection. Checklist with commentary of an exhibition at the Museum of Primitive Art, Feb 19–May 18, 1958. New York: Museum of Primitive Art. (unpaginated)

King, Heidi. 2013. “The Wari Feathered Panels from Corral Redondo, Churunga Valley: A Re-examination of Context.” Ñawpa Pacha, Journal of Andean Archaeology 33 (1): 23–42.

The Met

In This Ancient City, Even Commoners Lived in Palaces

tlatollotl:

View from the Moon Pyramid to the Road of the Dead in the ancient Teotihuacán Pyramids in Mexico.Tais Policanti

This story was originally published in Spanish by HuffPost Mexico. A version of it has been adapted and republished here in English with permission from HuffPost Mexico.

Millions of tourists visit the ruins of Teotihuacán every year. They climb the pyramids, walk the Avenue of the Dead, and learn about the spectacular artifacts recovered from the ancient Mesoamerican city. Looking across the vast and remarkably well-preserved stone complex, built by hand by a pre-Aztec civilization, many likely assume that only a powerful despotic king—directing hordes of slave or serf laborers—could have orchestrated the construction of such a carefully planned city. Indeed, this is what archaeologists once believed. If tourists make the effort to visit some of the excavated residential compounds outside the main archaeological zone, however, they may start to understand why such assumptions about Teotihuacán society are changing. For these structures lie at the heart of our shifting perspective of the ancient city: namely, that it was far more egalitarian than we had previously imagined possible.

I began my archaeological career in the 1970s as an undergraduate examining artifacts at Teotihuacán. That first trip to Mexico cemented my love not only for the archaeology, but also for Mexican life and culture. In the decades since, I moved on to excavating Aztec-period sites in the provinces of that civilization’s empire. In 2015, when I was appointed director of Arizona State University’s archaeological lab in San Juan Teotihuacán, I got to return to my first love among Mexican sites, armed with new ideas about ancient cities and urban life. But after just a few years of work, I began to see Teotihuacán in a very different light.

Compared with the Aztec sites I have studied, Teotihuacán seems very strange, and not just because of its huge size (100,000 people, living in an area of close to 20 square kilometers). For one, it’s the only pre-modern Mexican city completely planned with a grid layout. For another, its residents lived in a form of housing—apartmentlike multifamily compounds with white lime-plaster floors, ornamented roofs, and porches—remarkably spacious and luxurious for the ancient world. These complexes are key to the conclusion of many researchers, including myself, that the city’s residents lived far more economically equal lives than any other known Mesoamerican society.

These new insights into Teotihuacán have come thanks to extensive fieldwork on the site. This includes decades of study from archaeologists excavating the pyramids and apartment compounds, who have helped to more fully reconstruct the architecture of the long-abandoned city and unearthed artifacts that are giving us clues about the lives of the people who inhabited it. It also includes work from anthropologists like René Millon and George Cowgill, who mapped the entire city and took more than 5,000 collections of artifacts from the surface of the ground. These materials are now stored in the lab I direct, where they are being studied by archaeologists.

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In This Ancient City, Even Commoners Lived in Palaces

tlatollotl:

Fish Hacha

Date: 6th–8th century

Geography: Mexico, Mesoamerica, Veracruz

Culture: Classic Veracruz

Mesoamerican ballplayers wore protective gear called hachas, palmas, and yokes to protect their hips and abdomens from the impact of the game’s solid rubber ball (see MMA 1978.412.15 and 1978.412.16). In painting and sculpture, the yoke is shown worn around the player’s hips, the palma or hacha attached at the front. Those used during active play were most likely made of wood or some other light material; stone versions such as this one were worn, if at all, during ballgame-related rituals, or placed on display. Given the distinctive design of each hacha, both those worn and those carved in stone may have served to identify teams or individuals.

Hachas also vary greatly in form and size, so much so that they qualify as a group only in contrast to the taller and thinner palmas. The Metropolitan’s own collection includes hachas in the form of human or animal heads, full figures, even one representing a pair of human hands. The name hacharefers to the axe-like form of many (hacha is Spanish for axe), including the example seen here. In these, the back is slightly wider than the front where the sides converge in a sharp point. Facial features and any other details are carved on low relief, each side a mirror image of the other.

In other ways this stone hacha is unusual in both its subject and composition. In order to conform to the classic hacha shape, the artist has rendered the face, body and tail fin in consecutive, ascending registers of low relief. This creative solution to the problem of representing a horizontal subject within the confines of the vertical hacha format does not preclude a closely observed, detailed rendering of the subject, however. The artist has carefully rendered each scale individually, with increased depth of relief from front to back, mimicking how fish fins overlap in nature. The rounded form of the cheeks, slightly open mouth, and flared gills suggest the respiration and movement of the fish as it passes through the water.

In jarring contrast to this naturalistic image is the fish’s unusual profile. The inclusion of what looks like a very human nose suggests a composite being of the supernatural realm. The belief in a watery underworld inhabited by deities was widespread throughout Mesoamerica. At the Classic Veracruz city of El Tajín, scenes of ballgame-related rituals both on earth and in the underworld are carved on the walls of one of its many ball courts. In one, a man wearing a fish helmet sits in a water-filled temple, surrounded by supernatural figures. The unusual blending of fish and human elements on this hacha may reflect the widespread Mesoamerican belief that the ball court was a conduit, the game and its rituals a way of connecting humans to the deities dwelling in that realm.

Patricia Joan Sarro, 2017

Published references

Art of Oceania, Africa, and the Americas from the Museum of Primitive Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969, fig. 584.

Resources and additional reading

Ceremonial Sculpture of Veracruz. New York: Long Island University, 1987.
Earley, Caitlin C. “The Mesoamerican Ballgame.” In The Hilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/mball/hd_mball.htm (June 2017)

Koontz, Rex. Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpent: The Public Sculpture of El Tajín. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

Leyenaar, Ted J.J. Ulama, Jeu de Balle des Olmeques aux Azteques – Ballgame, from the Olmecs to the Aztecs. Lausanne: Musée Olympique, 1997.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 12, The Pacific Islands, Africa, and the Americas

Scott, John F. “Dressed to Kill: Stone Regalia of the Mesoamerican Ballgame”. In The Sport of Life and Death, The Mesoamerican Ballgame, E. Michael Whittington, ed., pp. 50–63 New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001.

Shook, Edwin M. and Elayne Marquis. Secrets in Stone: Yokes, Hachas and Palmas from Southern Mesoamerica. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996.

Von Winning, Hasso and Nelly Gutiérrez Solana. La Iconographía de la Cerámica de Río Blanco, Veracruz. Mexico City: UNAM Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1996.

The Met

tlatollotl:

Tetrapod Bowl

Date: 1st–4th century

Geography: Guatemala, Mesoamerica

Culture: Maya

Wide-mouthed bowls or plates are believed to have been used as presentation or serving vessels. Those raised on four bulbous feet are identified with the Maya lowlands of Mexico and Guatemala in the earliest centuries A.D. and include a rather showy type surfaced with an arresting, bright orange-red slip, as seen here. The surface is continuous, even, and smooth in color; the shape is clean lined and well balanced. This type of vessel represents a considerable display of proficiency in the art and technique of the potter and was valued as a precious object at the time of manufacture. Other ceramics of specialized shape and size were finished with the same orange-red surface color. Perhaps suites of similarly hued ceramic containers were particularly meaningful together. This example has dark gray firing-clouds on the bottom of the feet, the only change in color from smooth orange-red on the vessel.

The Met

The Norte Chico civilization had large edifices, textiles, organized government, and music, but no visual art (unlike seemingly every other civilization and culture). What are the current leading theories on why there is no visual art? • r/AskHistorians

tlatollotl:

Answer by /u/CommodoreCoCo

This is a simple question, but it ties to a huge theoretical discussion in Andean Archaeology. So…

First let’s narrow the question to something more tangible. What does visual art mean in the pre-Columbian Andes? Art historians most typically focus on three traditions: pottery, textiles, and sculpture.

  • Textiles can preserve for thousands of years if the environment is both dry and unexposed enough, and we have a few examples of textiles from the desert Norte Chico region. Cotton was actually one of the first cultivated crops on Peru’s north coast, alongside other utilitarian plants like gourds. Though we don’t have elaborately decorated textiles like we see in later periods in the same area, it’s no stretch to assume they existed: a few of the known samples retain traces of dye. Additionally, the Chinchorro culture on the south coast mummified their dead with dyed and embroidered fabrics thousands of years before the Norte Chico centers coalesced.
  • Ceramics preserve much longer than textiles in a variety of conditions. However, the Norte Chico sites date to the the Late Preceramic (or Archaic) period, that is, they predate the earliest known pottery in the Andes. So much (some might say too much) of our archaeological methods relate to ceramics in that this hinders both our ability to identify “visual art” and our understanding of many larger sociocultural phenomena. (“But how could they have had pyramids without ceramics? I know my Civ V tech tree!” more on that later…)
  • Stone sculpture and rock art is likewise unknown during the Late Archaic. The earliest examples of free-standing lithic art are at Cerro Sechin, whose monuments are covered in images of disembodied heads, captives, and warriors. The site is not far from the Norte Chico, but dates to the end of the Archaic period around 1500 BC. The most notable early lithic traditions, such as that at Chavin, are associated with powerful centralized hierarchies and single-event constructions. Chavin’s temple was modified and expanded over time, but in distinct sections. Most Late Archaic monuments were built over time in a series of small building and feasting events. Any authority was ephemeral and constantly needed to be reasserted- carved monoliths would not be part of such a process.

Thus the quick and boring answer to your question is “We haven’t found any.” Any further reason presupposes that they “should” have visual art- and why should they? The obvious answer is “Because everyone else with monumental architecture, textiles, government, and music did!” In any other answer I’d explain why that’s dumb and move on. But the scholarship around the Norte Chico is a special case- so it’s your lucky day! Here’s CoCo’s History of Archaeological Theory 101TM

Thinking that the Norte Chico should have visual art is a relic of early anthropologists that sought to categorize societies into progressive evolutionary stages based on their technological achievements. Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society most famously defined three main stages of Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization: Norte Chico would be an easy fit for this definition of Civilization. As anthropologists started actually doing research, they realized this was crap: cultures didn’t develop the same across the globe. This new cultural-historical school replaced Morgan’s evolutionary thought at the turn of the century. It focused on defining and describing specific cultures at specific points in time, assuming archaeology could do little more. In the ‘60s archaeologists started flirting with these fancy things called “science” and “technology.” Maybe, they thought, this New Archaeology was capable of much more than making up cultures to give potsherds to. Maybe, even, it could describe process across time! Thus was born Processual Archaeology. While archaeology was forever changed by the new emphasis on scientific data collection, the Processualists, like Leslie White and Kent Flannery, also (re)introduced a neo-evolutionary perspective. Instead of classifying “savages” and “barbarians,” they focused on the development of sociopolitical complexity from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states. It avoided the pejorative terminology and sense of moral progress associated with Morgan, but it continued a fallacy of similarity. Adhering to categories of tribes and chiefdoms caused people to look for tribes and chiefdoms. Once you’ve identified a chiefdom, you can then extrapolate other things about how that society worked… except that’s not how cultures work. Once more, in the ‘80s, younger archaeologists had to remind everyone that cultures were unique and special in their own way. That paradigm shift is now so long ago that calling yourself “post-processual” is passé.

Academic discussion of the Late Archaic in the Norte Chico region is contentious because the preeminent scholars remain staunch processualists. Elsewhere in the Andes, archaeologists are asking what critics call “microfocused” questions of social identity, power formation, social collapse, foodways, trade networks, craft production, etc. These are essentially synchronic questions, that is, ones that look at interactions between different co-existing groups, with descriptive answers. Processualism looks at diachronic questions, that is, ones that compare the same group at different times, with categorical answers. The literature is filled with words like “emergence” and “complexity.” To a critic like myself, and most anyone else who attended school in the 80s or later, the scholars at Caral, Supe, Cerro Lampay, and other Late Archaic sites are not looking to describe the sites on their own terms but to determine if they are a “civilization” or “complex” yet. A 2007 paper by Haas and Creamer, for instance, was rightly met with criticism from many Andeanists, and has since distanced them from working in the region. Ostensibly the study hoped to inform our knowledge of “where Andean civilization began,” itself a question post-processualists would never ask. It was limited, however, to an extensive survey of the Norte Chico and neighboring regions to collect soil core samples and calculate the dates for various sites. From just the settlement distribution and dates, the authors hoped to rewrite the sociopolitical development of the region and identify which things were “complex,” and maybe even which groups of sites were a “civilization.” The authors do use the term “complex” self-critically, but still hold to the idea that:

the civilizations of the six world areas [Mesopotamia, Egypt, Incia, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes] underwent similar processes of change and eventually converged on similar levels of cultural complexity, but their paths and histories were unique

Just how two areas, let alone six, can have unique histories but similar processes of change is beyond me. The authors follow this with a brief survey of what the process is: hunter gatherer -> agriculturalists -> cities -> multi-site polities. That there even is a unidirectional process at all is questionable; that the process has distinct stages even more so. As I’ve mentioned, once you put something in a category the tendency is to look for things in it that other members of the category have. This approach has tainted research in the Norte Chico. People see monuments and assume there must have been some form of centralized power. If there is power, then the society must be later in that process, and probably has other things like organized religion or specialized labor. But if you look for the people or site that had that power, you’ll most likely find it- even if other intensive excavations don’t fit with your model of centralized power. Yay confirmation bias.

So that’s the can of worms your question can open up.

TL;DR They didn’t have visual art because we haven’t found any. There’s no reason to suppose they should have had any. Unfortunately, most archaeologists don’t like the ones working in the region because their theory and methods are 55 years out of date.

The Norte Chico civilization had large edifices, textiles, organized government, and music, but no visual art (unlike seemingly every other civilization and culture). What are the current leading theories on why there is no visual art? • r/AskHistorians