Moche Art

discovery that Moche pottery represents a limited number of

nonsecular figures and themes rather than a picture of the

A. Little is known about the Moche people.

B. A large body of painted and sculptural pottery has

1. Inventive and technologically advanced potters who worked primarily in slip-painted redware.

2. Stirrup-spout bottles the predominant form

III Limitations on the study of Moche pottery.

A. Looters have dispersed artifacts making dating and

distribution studies difficult.

B. Number and, perhaps, type of pots in graves correlate

with status but looting interferes with systematic study

IV Study of Moche iconography prior to 1970s.

A. Early view was that an infinite variety of objects,

probably depicting all of Moche life, were found in their art.

B. Assessments of the nature of Moche art were often based

on anachronistic biases of the observers.

C. Iconographic studies between 1900 and 1970.

1. Studies identifying plants and animals depicted.

2. Minor studies of themes and recurrent imagery.

V Development of archive of Moche iconography.

A. Collection and sorting of 7,000 images deriving from

collections with over 100,000 specimens.

B. Categorizing of imagery into 90 categories with

. . .
the feline in Figure 2 shows that this may be misleading. The second ceramic shows a feline, represented as being the same size as a human being. The cat sits next to the man and leans his head toward his neck. The man is a prisoner, whose hands are shown firmly bound behind his back, and the cat is fatally drawing his blood as part of a religious ritual. Yet if the shocked figure of the prisoner were somehow to be taken away from this composition there is little about the artist's rendering of the feline that would not meet von Hagen's standard of naturalistic "tenderness" and "affectionate" representation. This is not to denigrate von Hagen's discussion nor those of any other archaeologists. Certainly prior to the presentation of the archive-based studies Benson, for example, noted that it was necessary to be "very careful in speaking of Mochica realism or in stating, 'they left us a wonderful record of their daily life'" since, even though anything one concludes about Moche religion is speculative, "it is certain that all their artifacts had significance" of a religious or quasi-religious type (24). As Donnan notes, the study of Moche iconography began near the turn of the century with the publication of various collect
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Approximate Word count = 4926
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)

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