Enemies – Strangers – Neighbours. Image of the Others in Moche Culture

Summary

Moche art served the purpose of not only disseminating specific content of a religious nature, but it was also a tool of social influence and control. Its iconography gives an exceptional opportunity to study the mechanisms of perceiving and presenting others (representatives of different cultural and probably also ethnic group) by a society which has not left behind any written documents for us. It is also interesting how these representations could be used in the process of shaping (reinforcing) the coastal population’s own group identity. In this paper, I try to answer the question of how the information regarding neighbors was built, what its concept could be and what social functions it could serve among the groups living in the Southern Moche Region (the area bordering with a territory occupied by a culturally separate population, related – presumable – to another polity or polities).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Everybody Else: The Predecessors and Contemporaries of the Moche on the North Coast of Peru

Keywords

Spatial Coverage