Archaeometric Analysis of Mural Paintings at Pachacamac, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

From 2014 to 2018, we excavated Building B15, a small temple decorated with mural paintings at the archaeological site of Pachacamac. These are the first paintings discovered on the site since 1938. On the walls, as on many fallen adobe bricks, polychrome motifs painted in several layers can be seen on mud plaster or directly on the adobe walls. The archaeological context, absolute dates and iconography suggest a date around the beginning of the sixteenth century, i.e the end of the Pre-Hispanic Period.

The exceptional value of these paintings led us to carry out an in-depth study of the stratigraphy of the pictorial layers and laboratory analyses: optical microscopy, SEM-EDX, FT-IR and μ-Raman. Preliminary results corroborate studies carried out on other mural paintings of the central coast of Peru but also reveal new data about pigments. In addition to the murals, tools used for the mural decoration were discovered in the same building: a collection of paintbrushes, bowls, rough pigments, and a grinding stone. We were able to identify the brush bristles with light microscopy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22945