Seeing Prehistory in Color: Interpreting the Use of Colored Pigments at the Tiwanaku Omo Temple, Moquegua, Peru

Author(s): Paul Goldstein; Jason Kjolsing

Year: 2015

Summary

Although color is often at the background of our lived experience, colors also have the power to demand our attention. In this paper we explore how color was a meaningful component of the built environment in prehistoric South America and specifically the ways it demanded the attention of the Tiwanaku (AD 500-1100) of the south-central Andes. Extensive excavations at the Tiwanaku Omo ceremonial temple (M10A) in Moquegua, Peru have revealed the use of red and green pigments on selective walls and doorways throughout the structure. Using ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological data, we argue that the colors of Omo’s built environment symbolized circulating liquids and guided temple supplicants along a ceremonial procession pathway. We suggest that attention to color is an important avenue for understanding the significance of the built environment and other materials from prehistory.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

Cite this Record

Seeing Prehistory in Color: Interpreting the Use of Colored Pigments at the Tiwanaku Omo Temple, Moquegua, Peru. Jason Kjolsing, Paul Goldstein. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 397979)

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

Keywords

Geographic Keywords
South America

Spatial Coverage

min long: -93.691; min lat: -56.945 ; max long: -31.113; max lat: 18.48 ;