Where-felines? An XRF-Based Sourcing of Tiwanaku's Chachapuma Sculptures

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Turnovers in political and religious authority in the ancient Titicaca Basin correspond with significant, intentional shifts in material procurement practices. During the 5th century AD, the developing Tiwanaku elite asserted a new ideological hegemony through a novel monumental and iconographic tradition. Tiwanaku masons also switched from the red, locally sourced sandstone common in earlier ritual constructions and began quarrying, among other stones, volcanic andesite and basalt for use in temple walls and free-standing sculpture. Prior studies have used XRF based compositional analysis to locate the quarries of prominent temple stones and anthropomorphic monoliths. The results have shown how this highly visible change propagated a rejection of prior cosmology and naturalized the new order by incorporating the animate, symbolically potent environment into a constructed landscape. This study applies the same techniques to locate the quarrying sites for a set of stone sculptures called "chachapumas," or were-felines, that hold decapitated human heads and were once situated at the entrance to temples in the Tiwanaku capital. The chachapumas' violent imagery is a drastic departure from pre-Tiwanaku art and has a clear implication of power, so we consider them key to a better understanding of the emergence of Tiwanaku hegemony.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26204