Image Encounters: Moche Murals and Archaeo Art History

By Lisa Trever

2022 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize, Bard Graduate Center

A landmark study of ancient Peruvian Moche mural art.

Moche murals of northern Peru represent one of the great, yet still largely unknown, artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Created in an era without written scripts, these murals are key to understandings of Moche history, society, and culture. In this first comprehensive study on the subject, Lisa Trever develops an interdisciplinary methodology of “archaeo art history” to examine how ancient histories of art can be written without texts, boldly inverting the typical relationship of art to archaeology.

Trever argues that early coastal artistic traditions cannot be reduced uncritically to interpretations based in much later Inca histories of the Andean highlands. Instead, the author seeks the origins of Moche mural art, and its emphasis on figuration, in the deep past of the Pacific coast of South America. Image Encounters shows how formal transformations in Moche mural art, before and after the seventh century, were part of broader changes to the work that images were made to perform at Huacas de Moche, El Brujo, Pañamarca, and elsewhere in an increasingly complex social and political world. In doing so, this book reveals alternative evidentiary foundations for histories of art and visual experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781477324295

Book preview

IMAGE ENCOUNTERS

MOCHE MURALS AND ARCHAEO ART HISTORY

LISA TREVER

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

This book is a part of the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas publication initiative, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2022

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Trever, Lisa, author.

Title: Image encounters : Moche murals and archaeo art history / Lisa Trever.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021027327

ISBN 978-1-4773-2426-4 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2427-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2428-8 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2429-5 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Mochica mural painting and decoration—Peru—Pañamarca Site. | Mochica Indians—Peru—Pañamarca Site—Antiquities. | Mural painting and decoration, Peruvian. | Indian mural painting and decoration. | Indians of South America—Antiquities. | Huacas—Peru.

Classification: LCC F3429.3.P34 T74 2022 | DDC 985/.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027327

doi:10.7560/324264

For Stephen and Madeleine

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION: Image Encounters

CHAPTER 1: Mural Origins and Coastal Corporealities

CHAPTER 2: Formulating Traditions: Ancestral Divinities, Norcosteño Design, and the Aesthetics of Replication in Moche Mural Art (200–650 CE)

CHAPTER 3: Siting Narratives: Moche Mural Painting and the Condensation of a Medium (650–850 CE)

CHAPTER 4: Archaeo-Iconology: An Archaeology of Image Experience and Response

CONCLUSION: On the Huaca

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PREFACE

More than twenty years ago, as a field school student in Peru, I made the first of what would be many visits to the Moche site of Huaca de la Luna in north-coastal Peru. In 1998, archaeologists had just begun to pull back the sand dunes and fallen adobes to reveal the colossal facade of the Old Temple. As I reflect on this book’s origins and the many debts it has accrued, I realize that its initial spark—my own formative encounter—was that sight of the emerging bodies of warriors in procession and the ranks of gods. In the years and decades that followed, the project directed by Santiago Uceda and Ricardo Morales brought both the Old Temple and the New Temple back into view and made possible the study of their paintings and reliefs. Simultaneously, at El Brujo, Régulo Franco and his colleagues were working to excavate and document the temple of Huaca Cao Viejo. More than ten years ago, when I was a graduate student assisting in Jeffrey Quilter’s archaeological project at the colonial-era site of Magdalena de Cao, which had been built in the shadow of Huaca Cao Viejo, I was able to spend time looking at, photographing, and thinking about that Moche huaca, too. Not long after that, in 2010, I began my own field research at Pañamarca, where my team excavated, conserved, and documented what had been known of the Moche paintings first published in the 1950s. We had the good fortune to uncover other painted walls that had not been seen since they were interred long centuries prior. More recently, in 2018 and 2019, my fieldwork at Pañamarca has continued, with a different team and with different aims. Our work of mural excavation and conservation was to recommence in 2020—suspended for now by the global pandemic. This book’s gestation has been long, and its debts are many. I have been living with the huacas in my head for more years than I haven’t.

The plan for this book began as an envisioned Part 3 of my 2017 volume, The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru. That book was born out of an ethical imperative to publish the full account of the archaeology and conservation of the painted architecture that my collaborators and I opened, documented, and then reburied. Given the uncertainties of any individual human life, that book had to come first, before this one, to present and preserve what we found and were privileged to see at Pañamarca. And indeed, the years since that book’s publication have brought crises, both public and personal, that remind us that life is short and future opportunities are never guaranteed. In initially conceiving of this book, I was guided by the questions: How did the mural paintings of Pañamarca come to be? How did they relate to the corpus of mural art known elsewhere, at other sites and from earlier eras? What were the artistic traditions and cultures of image making that gave rise to them, and in which their makers participated? Answers to those questions, insofar as they can be answered, and always with the caveat that what we know could change profoundly with the next excavation, take us far beyond Pañamarca.

I am grateful to many people and institutions for their support. First and foremost, I thank the communities of Nepeña and Capellanía for their hospitality and collaboration in making the Pañamarca fieldwork possible. I could not have carried out that work without the partnerships of Peruvian collaborators Jorge Gamboa, Ricardo Toribio, Ricardo Morales, and Pedro Neciosup in 2010, and Hugo Ikehara, Jessica Ortiz, and José Ochatoma Cabrera in 2018 and 2019. For his tireless work as the sole Ministry of Culture employee charged with the care and management of Pañamarca, we are all indebted to Adrián Villón. We remember Germán Llupton, whom we lost to Covid-19 in 2020.

For their expertise and support in Peru, I thank the late Duccio Bonavia, the late Santiago Uceda, Ricardo Morales, Régulo Franco, and Moisés Tufinio. For their guidance I thank Tom Cummins, Jeffrey Quilter, Joanne Pillsbury, Carol Mackey, and Brian Billman. I am grateful for conversations with many Andeanist colleagues, including Yuri Berezkin, Sue Bergh, Alicia Boswell, Carrie Brezine, Karen Bruhns, Richard Burger, Ari Caramanica, Claude Chapdelaine, David Chicoine, Patricia Chirinos, Marco Curatola Petrocchi, Solsiré Cusicanqui, Carolyn Dean, Chris Donnan, Arabel Fernández, Peter Fuchs, Miłosz Giersz, Andrew Hamilton, Christine Hastorf, Sabine Hyland, Margaret Jackson, Michele Koons, George Lau, Krzysztof Makowski, Luis Muro, Stella Nair, Cecilia Pardo, Elena Phipps, Gabriel Prieto, Dave Reid, Carlos Rengifo, John Rick, Julio Rucabado, Lucy Salazar, Sarahh Scher, Izumi Shimada, Jeffrey Splitstoser, Henry Tantaleán, Matthias Urban, Parker Van Valkenburgh, John Verano, Héctor Walde, Mary Weismantel, Juliet Wiersema, Ryan Williams, and Véronique Wright.

This research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Hellman Family Foundation, the Stahl Endowment for Archaeological Research and the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, the Rust Family Foundation, the Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant program and the Office of the Provost at Columbia University, and the Rubin-Ladd Foundation as well as the generosity of Bernard and Lisa Selz. The contributions of former and current students, including Kirsten Larsen, Melanie Miller, Sarah Tsung, Gabriella Wellons, Spencer Pao Murphy, Sophia Gebara, and Ivanna Rodríguez Rojas, have been essential, as was the early editorial aid of Amanda Sparrow.

I cannot overstate the importance of either my faculty writing group at UC Berkeley, from 2013 to 2018, or the day-long manuscript workshop held at Columbia in the fall of 2019, for challenging and helping refine the ideas in this book. For their roles in the latter, I am grateful to Sarah Cole, Michael Cole, Robert Harrist, Severin Fowles, Rosemary Joyce, Michele Koons, Claudia Brittenham, Terry D’Altroy, Sonia Sorrentini, Katherine McCarthy, and all of the workshop participants. I also thank the graduate students in the Art, Anthropology, Archaeology seminar that I co-taught with Severin Fowles in spring 2021 for their comments on the manuscript, as well as Beate Fricke and the Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art group at Universität Bern for their insightful observations.

For their generous help with images, I thank Ulla Holmquist, Giannina Bardales, Isabel Collazos, Ignacio Alva, Ricardo Morales, Alyson Williams, Carol Mackey, Heiko Prümers, Yoshio Onuki, Edward Ranney, Santiago Salazar Mena, José Luis Cruzado Colonel, Miriam Kolar, Jean-François Millaire, Flannery Surette, Robert Benfer, Koichiro Shibata, Paul Bell, and Tim Trombley and the staff of the Media Center for Art History. I am very happy to be able to include here maps made by Hugo Ikehara and original watercolors made by scientific illustrator Kathryn Killackey. At the University of Texas Press, I thank Kerry Webb for her ongoing support, as well as Andrew Hnatow, Lynne Ferguson, and Derek George, together with freelance editors Nancy Warrington and Amyrose McCue Gill and indexer Sue Gaines, for their talent, skill, and care.

I thank my family—my parents, Donna and Joe Senchyshyn; my brothers and their families; my sister-in-law and her children; my husband, Stephen Trever; and our daughter, Madeleine—for their unflagging support, patience, and love over these long and often difficult years.

Finally, I thank the huacas for what they have shown me and taught me. I acknowledge and honor the people who made them, who cared for them, who lived among them long ago, and whose presence remains within them still, as well as all those who care for them now.

INTRODUCTION

IMAGE ENCOUNTERS

0.1. Pre-Hispanic street through the coastal center of Pachacamac. Photograph by Ingo Mehling, provided by Wikimedia Commons through a Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 3.0), edited from the original.

ON THE COASTAL ROADS

The foreign captain and his company were on the move under the blaze of the equatorial sun. Upon entering the territory of the Inca Empire, at the town of Tumbes, one of the scribes recorded their astonishment at the sight of the great temple of the sun, which was painted inside and out, with large paintings in rich shades of color.¹ As they continued on their way on the royal roads, on horseback and on foot (figure 0.1), they found relief from the heat along stretches where engineers had planted rows of trees to form canopies or built high walls to offer shade to weary travelers. They marveled at the menagerie of monsters and fish and other animals that the indios—as they referred to the people who lived there—had painted on the walls.² The hundreds of men and women in Francisco Pizarro’s company were traveling in 1532 from what is now Ecuador into northern Peru, and then east to the mountain town of Cajamarca, where they were told the Inca emperor Atahualpa was visiting the royal baths at the nearby hot springs.³ There, with the aid of Indigenous Andean allies, Pizarro and his men ambushed and attacked the Inca forces and took their ruler captive.⁴ In the months that followed, they ransomed and executed Atahualpa before marching south on the imperial capital of Cusco and setting off a series of events that irrevocably changed the history of Andean South America. That first confrontation between Pizarro and Atahualpa has become emblematic, not only of the Spanish Conquest of Peru, but also of the clash of European and Inca traditions, values, and visualities that began with those violent events.⁵ But, on the coastal plains, outside of the highland Inca imperial centers, both prior to Cajamarca and in the months and years that followed, Pizarro and his entourage were confronted with a different world—a world that had only recently been brought under Inca control.

This is a book about a pre-Hispanic subaltern world. The ancient coastal centers of pre-Inca Peru and the monumental artistic practices of its early communities are this study’s subject. Its focus is mural art created during the Moche era of about 200 to 850 CE. Moche muralists worked earth, clay, and paint into an extraordinary range of images that included ancestral divinities (figure 0.2), epic battles between an ancient hero and a series of monstrous creatures, scenes of combat between elite warriors (figure 0.3), processions and dances, sacrifices and offerings, and other complex narratives of creation and metamorphosis. Architects and artists adapted this pliable medium to diverse effects and for different groups of beholders within plazas, patios, and the inner spaces of coastal temples (huacas).⁶ Although the word refers colloquially to ruins or mounds, huacas were not simply architecture: over time they became—and continue to be—living monuments and ancient beings with numinous presence within the landscape. As this book demonstrates, the uses of mural art varied considerably during these centuries. Changes to the medium after about 650 CE are so striking, in fact, that the history of Moche mural art should be written as not one history but two. The seventh century was not only a time of transformations in the appearance of mural art. It was a time of social change, as well as a time of changes to the work that images did to shape worlds and to engender both social cohesion and exclusion. In its attention to Moche mural art and its antecedents, this is a book that bridges art history and archaeology. But its purpose is not to force the premodern South American subject into art historical categories developed in and for the West. Rather, it embraces a wide array of images painted, sculpted, and scratched on the earthen walls of ancient coastal architecture, both in the creation of formal artistic programs and as more expedient acts of image making.

0.2. Detail of a mural at Huaca Cao Viejo. Photograph by the author.

0.3. Detail of a pair of warriors from a relief at Huaca Cao Viejo. Photograph courtesy of Carol J. Mackey.

ANCIENT TEXTUAL ABSENCE AND COLONIAL DESCRIPTIONS

Given its setting in the deep past of the Peruvian coast, this book is not one that could be written from conventional historical sources. Pre-Hispanic communities of South America did not use writing (defined narrowly as spoken language that is referenced phonetically by visible marks);⁷ instead, they preserved their histories through oral traditions and collective memory, at times aided by meaningful objects like quipus (twisted and knotted cords) that served as ledgers and as mnemonic aids to oral recitation.⁸ Indigenous texts written in Andean languages during the first decades of Spanish colonization were few. Apart from descriptions of the oracular shrine of Pachacamac, which Hernando Pizarro and others visited and looted in 1533, destroying the idol that they said was inhabited by the devil,⁹ early European eyewitness accounts of the earthen architecture of coastal Peru are rare. Accounts of more ancient, pre-Inca monuments are far fewer still.¹⁰ Often it seems that the sixteenth-century scribes and soldiers who recorded their journeys through this landscape lacked the language, and at times the will, to describe the things they saw.¹¹ Their descriptions are spare in detail (it was a thing to see),¹² colored by confusion, fear, and condescension, and shaped by their pursuits of personal wealth and glory that they often narrated as a defense of the Catholic faith. More than a century after the sacking of Pachacamac, the Jesuit missionary Bernabé Cobo recalled that its walls had been plastered with earth and paint of several colors, including many fine works for their style, though these works seemed crude to us. There were diverse figures of animals, though they were poorly formed like everything else these Indians painted.¹³ Even when Indigenous temples and monuments survived the blows of invaders and the zealotry of the extirpators of idolatry, they suffered the further indignities of foreign denigration in these sparse early colonial accounts.

At times, colonial agents unearthed long-buried murals in the process of dismantling ancient monuments in their quests to extract treasures made of gold and silver.¹⁴ Occasionally, they recorded what they saw. In one such campaign, in 1602, the miners diverted the flow of the Moche River to blast away some two-thirds of Huaca del Sol, a massive Moche-era architectural complex of stepped platforms and terraces made of adobe bricks (figures 0.4–0.6), in order to wash out metal objects concealed within. The Augustinian friar Antonio de la Calancha recounted the hydraulic operation decades later. Near a cache of silver and gold objects, including a large statue that he described as a bishop, Calancha recalled the sudden appearance of a wall, crudely painted, he wrote, with images of bearded men on horseback bearing swords and lances.¹⁵ Although Andean men typically removed their facial hair with tweezers, Moche warriors were often depicted with black facial paint and could have appeared bearded to seventeenth-century eyes (see figure 0.3). But there were no horses in South America prior to European landfall. That this detail cannot be so easily explained away as Eurocentric misunderstanding is precisely the point. Indeed, what the author explicitly claimed to have seen within the destruction of the inner (i.e., incontrovertibly pre-Hispanic) construction of Huaca del Sol were, impossibly, images of Spaniards. Calancha interpreted the ancient mural as evidence of an ancient Andean prophecy—either as a warning from the devil or a revelation from heaven—of the coming of foreigners who would conquer Peru but also open the door to the salvation of their souls.¹⁶ Such apocryphal interpretations of things seen in the Americas—like claims for the apostolic presence of Saint Thomas or Saint Bartholomew¹⁷—reveal more about evangelical agendas and the historical imaginations of colonial authors than they tell us about the physical realities of pre-Hispanic monuments.

0.4. Huaca del Sol in the Moche Valley. Photograph by Pitxiquin, provided by Wikimedia Commons through a Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0), cropped from the original.

0.5. Pedro Azabache, Mochera con la Huaca del Sol, 2006, oil on canvas, 62 × 50 cm. Collection of Wilbor Oliveros, Trujillo, Peru. Photograph courtesy of Santiago Salazar Mena.

0.6. Plan and elevation views of Huaca del Sol, in Martínez Compañón, Trujillo del Perú, 1780s. Real Biblioteca (Madrid), II/351 [vol. 9], fol. 7r. © Patrimonio Nacional.

0.7. Charles F. Lummis, At Chan Chan: An Adobe Wall with Bas Relief Sculpturing, 1893, cyanotype. Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum, Los Angeles; P.31810.

DISAPPEARANCES AND SCARCE SIGHTINGS

The paucity and the unreliability of these earliest Spanish accounts, together with the physical destruction of invasion and religious zealotry, have been further compounded by problems of material preservation. On the Peruvian coast, pre-Hispanic monumental architecture was often made of adobe bricks or packed earth. Early muralists did not work with the more durable materials of stucco or fresco, as in other parts of the ancient world including some areas of Mesoamerica (e.g., Teotihuacan). The soluble media of adobe, clay, and paints made from plant-based binders are especially vulnerable to desert winds and to episodic El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) rains.¹⁸ When left exposed, their substance is not permanent but ultimately ephemeral if not tended to and maintained by human hands. Ancient coastal architects were certainly well aware of these inevitabilities. Most murals that have survived have only done so because they were interred in their own time, often covered by subsequent construction that encased earlier buildings.¹⁹ With the passage of time and the forces of nature, walls left uncovered were quickly effaced and the imagery of mural art soon vanished.

Already by the beginning of the eighteenth century, few traces of painted or sculpted images remained visible on standing architecture that had been built prior to Inca control of the coast. In his 1780s survey of northern Peru, the bishop of Trujillo, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón y Bujanda, and his staff recorded local ruins in detail, apparently inspired by the interests of the Bourbon king of Spain, Charles III, in the Vesuvian excavations of Naples.²⁰ The bishop’s plans and elevations—including those of Huaca del Sol (see figure 0.6), as well as the later palaces of the Chimú kings of Chimor at Chan Chan—are detailed and carefully annotated, but they lack any sign of mural art.²¹ It would not be until the nineteenth century that foreign explorers and the first scientific archaeologists would begin to systematically reveal and record the earthen reliefs that lay beneath the surface at Chan Chan (figure 0.7).²² Elsewhere, in colonial cities and towns, aspects of pre-Hispanic traditions continued in the geometric patterns of adobe painting that one can still see today on the walls of the casonas built for the Spanish settlers of Trujillo.²³ Those wall paintings are, however, only a specter of the Indigenous art forms that had once been.

0.8. View of a fragmentary mural uncovered at Pañamarca in 1958. Photograph by Hans Horkheimer. Ministerio de Cultura, Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú, Lima.

In the twentieth century, chance discoveries of murals continued to occur, paradoxically, through architectural destruction as treasure seekers tore through ancient structures with pickaxes and spades, or as earthquakes and ENSO rains loosened the coverings of later layers of construction (figure 0.8). At times, archaeologists were able to step in to study and record what had been revealed. Yet in the absence of systematic protocols for the conservation of decorated adobe architecture, many of these murals soon perished as well. Only rarely, in the most arid places, like the coastal Inca center of Tambo Colorado, has mural painting or earthen relief survived to the present on standing architecture left exposed.²⁴ By 1974, so few examples of ancient Peruvian mural painting remained visible that the foremost authority on the subject lamented: Little is known. Documentation is almost nil, and direct evidence virtually nonexistent. Time and human neglect have erased all.²⁵

MONUMENTAL REEMERGENCES

And yet, despite all odds, archaeology of the last decades has proven that pessimism wrong. Up and down the coast of Peru, a world of monumental imagery has resurfaced at centers built from at least four thousand years ago until the time of the Incas. Unlike in prior centuries, the most extensive of these recent projects have been directed by Peruvians and carried out by Peruvian teams, sometimes with foreign collaboration and support. We now can see that, when first built, the walls of temples, palaces, and plazas of many coastal centers were arrayed with abundant figures and designs like those remarked upon in passing at Tumbes and along the Inca roads in 1532. Only now can we begin to comprehend the scale, the scope, and the longevity of these monumental traditions of ancient American image making.

Perhaps the most vibrant of these were the Moche traditions. Between the 1910s and the 1970s, a handful of Moche mural paintings came to light at places like Huaca de la Luna (within the Huacas de Moche complex), Pañamarca, and Pampa Grande.²⁶ With the watershed events of the discovery in 1987 of the royal tombs of Sipán,²⁷ which brought renewed attention to Moche archaeology, large-scale and long-term field projects commenced within the Moche huacas.²⁸ The most extensive of these have been at the El Brujo archaeological complex, begun in 1990, and at Huacas de Moche (also known as Huacas del Sol y de la Luna), which began the next year (figure 0.9).²⁹ These herculean programs of excavation, conservation, and research have made possible wide vistas of the painted architecture that had not been seen since the pre-Hispanic era. Smaller-scale projects at other Moche sites, including my team’s work at Pañamarca (figure 0.10),³⁰ have added to the growing corpus discussed in the pages of this book.

A MEDIUM REDEFINED

The corpus of Moche murals has expanded dramatically in the last thirty years, but this artistic tradition has only rarely been the subject of art historical study. The only survey of the medium appeared before that expansion and was limited to flat wall painting.³¹ Yet, as I demonstrate in this book, it was clay relief—not flat wall painting—that was the more ancient medium in coastal Peru, and arguably the more important medium for millennia. Flat paintings were comparatively rare in the earliest settings. Even fewer were entirely planar. Many mural paintings were created by first sketching the image onto the wall with shallow incisions that created a rough surface of micro relief. Although the seemingly base materiality of earth (barro, or mud) has been a liability in art historical valuations, earth and clay are exceedingly plastic media that enable extraordinary creativity. At times, Moche muralists alternated between mural painting and painted relief—or what one might think of instead as relief painting, since they always used color whether the surface was planar or not³²—and then back again, without apparent distinction. It is more productive, and more authentic to the ancient subject at hand, to regard murals with and without relief as one medium, rather than divide them a priori. My definition of mural art in this book is more expansive still in its embrace of figures, motifs, and patterns drawn on or scratched into the surfaces of walls either after they had been painted or sculpted, or where no painting or sculpture otherwise appeared (i.e., graffiti). A broad interest in image making, pictorial meaning, and visual response takes precedence here over art historical commitments to connoisseurship or to etic aesthetic criteria in this capacious definition of mural art.

0.9. View of the stepped facade and corner room within the plaza of the Old Temple of Huaca de la Luna. Each tier of the facade measures about three meters high. Photograph courtesy of the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna Archaeological Project.

0.10. Pedro Neciosup illustrating a painted pillar at Pañamarca in 2010. Photograph by the author.

SOUTH AMERICAN PREHISTORY, OR, HISTORY WITHOUT WRITING

In a strict sense, all of the events and traditions of human history in South America prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late 1520s belong to prehistory, a term that first came into scholarly usage in the middle of the nineteenth century,³³ and one that Indigenous writers have deemed inappropriate in contemporary usage.³⁴ This characterization is dictated by the dominance of the written word (narrowly construed) in modern conceptualizations of what history is and can be, especially in colonized places,³⁵ but it is also constrained by Americanist anthropology’s traditional claims to dominion over archaeology,³⁶ typically to the exclusion of more historicist or humanistic possibilities.³⁷ The implications of some communities’ possession and others’ dispossession of history have deleterious effects on comprehension of the past and contribute to ongoing inequities in the present. To write more ample histories with greater depth and dimension, we must take seriously the authority of multiple modalities of how the past is remembered and made manifest: in the materialization of landscapes and things, in the vitality of the spoken word, and in the inscription of both words and images. If prehistory does not exist, except as a hegemonic tool of division, we can then see the millennia of South America’s past (as for other precolonial places) for what they are: history without writing, conceived of elsewhere as the longue durée, deep history, big histories, and so on.³⁸ These narratives of early history are not written from conventional archives—themselves sites of institutional power and selective preservation—but from social memory and from the material texts of archaeologically recorded monuments, built environments, assemblages, and individual objects.³⁹

The endeavor to read ancient history from material remains is not, in some ways, a new pursuit. Already in the seventeenth century, European scholars, faced with the discovery of ancient traditions of a rapidly expanding world that could no longer be interpreted through biblical or classical history alone, began to suggest that objects could equal the evidentiary capacities of texts for writing world histories.⁴⁰ In the nineteenth century, the British geographer and historian Clements Markham, for example, proposed to read the ruins of Inca and other megalithic architecture of the Andes as a form of historical documentation, though his interpretations depended on evolutionary assumptions about architectural morphology.⁴¹ Like Markham, the US diplomat and proto-archaeologist E. George Squier read the Spanish histories of the Americas with a skeptical eye. He designed his own inquiries in Peru mainly to the elucidation of its aboriginal monuments, the only positive and reliable witnesses of the true condition of its ancient inhabitants.⁴² The narratives that Squier wrote from the testimonies of those architectonic witnesses had their own imperialist effects, like others of his day,⁴³ in denying local communities as the inheritors of the ancient monuments that he celebrated.⁴⁴

The critical breakthrough that distinguishes current practices of reading the past through nontextual materials from earlier endeavors was the radiocarbon revolution of the mid-twentieth century. With it, time could be measured independently of texts and monuments by reading the earth clocks of the slow radioactive decay of the remains of plants and other carbon-based life forms that bore witness to the deeper past.⁴⁵ Radiometric dating and later advances in carbon dating with accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) have equipped archaeologists with powerful tools for reading the deep past.⁴⁶ Modern chronometric technologies have had a liberating effect on prehistoric studies. That is—with independent means of dating—ceramics, architecture, and other forms of art and material cultural production are freed from prior teleological models of social evolution and from the tautological burden of serving as their own chronological proxies.⁴⁷ A meticulous chronology of ceramic forms does not, after all, yield a concomitant history of a society, but only an incomparable history of pottery.⁴⁸ With this methodological refinement, historicist attention to the dynamics of invention, response, and archaism becomes newly possible in pre-Hispanic material culture and image studies.

Modern archaeological practices provide the fundamental coordinates of space and time required for deep historicization (figure 0.11). The definition of chronologies, however, remains a question not only of measurement but also of political allegory.⁴⁹ The terms that archaeologists have used to order time in the central Andes have, since the 1960s, been tailored to specific, a priori prioritizations of centuries-long horizons (and ensuing intermediate periods) as evidenced by the widespread and roughly synchronic presence of recognizable styles of material culture.⁵⁰ These chronologies begin with Archaic or Preceramic periods (ca. 5000–1800 BCE), followed by Formative and Initial periods (the latter term in reference to the advent of ceramic technology, although that was not a simultaneous event everywhere), and then proceed to be divided by the spread of an early religious tradition (Chavín, the Early Horizon, overlapping with Formative in some models) around 800 BCE, and the territorial expansions of two pre-Hispanic empires: Wari (or Huari) beginning around 600 CE (the Middle Horizon) and Inca around 1400 CE (the Late Horizon). As these chronologies and the social narratives that motivated them have been revised over the last half century, with refined temporal control and greater resolution of political organization on the ground, it has become possible to write in terms of centuries, or even decades, in real time.

0.11. Map of the Andean area from southern Ecuador to northern Chile. The limit of the Inca Empire