An Interdisciplinary Proposal for the Study of Sound and Music in Moche Art: The Case of the Afterlife/Underworld Dances (Dance of the Dead)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In Moche art, archaeological evidence related to sound and music can be found in cultural materials from sculptured bottles to the notorious fine-line paintings. Sound-producing instruments, musicians, and musical performances have been featured worldwide in museum expositions and scholarly discourse about the Moche over the past four decades. One of the prominent thematic narratives given interpretative attention in Moche discourse is the Afterlife/Underworld Dances, where skeletons dance and play flutes in the world of the dead (hurin in the Andean ontologies). Morphological and iconographic variations in material cultural representations led me to establish five different sub-themes, which indicate chronological and regional idiosyncrasies in the production and distribution of this theme across the different valleys occupied by the Moche on the north coast of Peru. Here, I propose a methodological approach based on the convergence of visual semantics and ethnomusicological data, to examine ontological aspects of Moche sound production, such as the roles of flutes in rites of passage to the afterlife.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32934