Symbols of Transformative Power:Wari Split Eye Iconography in the Middle Horizon

Summary

Feline eyes have a refractory nature that relates to the dichotomy of light and shadows in Andean traditions in Peru and suggests they are significant in Wari iconography. Andean ethnographies have expressed an importance of binary concepts that play a role in understanding of cosmology, mythology, and ritual. I will use Susan E. Bergh’s (1999) classification of Wari elite textile iconography and apply it to ritual ceramic iconographic data from excavations at Conchopata to identify the characteristics of eye imagery. Located in the heartland, Conchopata was a center of production for ritual ceramics and should have been the perfect place for elites to demonstrate their power with ritual iconography. I will use ethnographic sources to propose a variety of interpretations of the analyzed subset of Wari imagery and to determine the possible importance of the cultural category of eyes during the Middle Horizon. I believe that feline or split eye iconography in a ritual context represents states of transition and transformation that justify an elite status of political power.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage