Images of the Living Past: 19th-Century Moche Archaeological Photographs and Everyday Indigeneity in the Northern Peruvian Andes

Summary

This presentation analyzes late 19th-century photography of Moche pre-Columbian buildings, as

a way to inspect the buildings’ incorporation into everyday indigenous lives. I will focus on the

work by German scientist Hans Heinrich Brüning (1848-1928). First arrived as an engineer hired

by the most important sugar haciendas of the region, Brüning’s interests quickly shifted towards

archaeological and ethnographic studies during his stay in the Northern Peruvian Andes between

1875 and 1920. His work was mainly focused on pre-Columbian Moche buildings and in

contemporary indigenous Moche populations, to the extent that his photographs are the earliest

documents of its kind. In this presentation, I will explore how Brüning’s images prove how these

buildings were part of contemporary indigenous roads, religion and labor; and how this

incorporation defined scientific understandings of indigeneity in this Andean region. In this

sense, Brüning’s images are relevant as they serve as ethnohistorical documents, as well as given

that they substantially explain the trajectories of archaeological sciences in this Andean region.

Finally, I explain how the meaning these images communicate is key to understand 20th-century

and present uses of these photographs by Moche descendants.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20666