Feeding the Body and Mind: Artistic Genesis through Blurring Species Boundaries

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Moche artistic representations are known for their composite images of plants, animals, humans, and supernatural forms. The genesis of this artistic tradition rests in the beliefs about the relations between species, environments, and worlds. Food acquisition, preparation, and communal consumption composed potent sets of practices that permitted these connections to be realized and species boundaries to be blurred. Evidence from Huaca Colorada, a Late Moche site, enables this exploration of Moche artistic genesis. Various examples of cooking and storage vessels with the remains of marine, terrestrial, and avian species have been uncovered in direct relation to human offerings. These individuals were of different ages, sex, and stages in their lives and the motivation for their association to these vessels appears to rest in their affiliation with distinct communities of practice. In this paper, we argue that the ritual deposits of storage and cooking vessels filled with a multitude of species both consumed and symbolically interred along with human offerings were powerful acts of gathering that simultaneously manifested in the forms of human and nonhuman beings blurred together in Moche material culture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37768.0