Image Making and Experience in Ancient Peru: Perspectives on Moche Painted Walls
Lisa Trever, PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Over
a millennium ago on the Pacific coast of Peru, artists from an ancient society
now known as the Moche painted stories and mythologies on the smoothed earthen
walls of their temple complexes. Unfortunately, the oral narratives of this
tradition are now all but lost. Studies of Moche art do not benefit from the
decipherment of hieroglyphic texts, as do studies of Classic Maya and other
Mesoamerica art. Even the earliest Spanish descriptions in South America are of
only limited use for interpretation. Without much recourse to texts, art
historians studying Moche murals must turn their full attention to the painted
images themselves, to their physical materials, and to the spatial and
geopolitical contexts in which they are situated.
In
this illustrated lecture, Trever will discuss her on-going, interdisciplinary
research on Moche temple murals that offers possibilities for recuperating—in
pictorial form—ancient narratives otherwise lost. Furthermore, archaeological
and forensic evidence reveals traces of how the ancient people who saw these
images responded to them in their own time. Her lecture will include mural
paintings recently discovered by Trever’s own field research at the site of
Pañamarca, as well as mural paintings from other Moche sites dramatically set
along Peru’s arid coast and lush valleys.
Image Caption: Painting
of a Moche priestess on a pillar at the ancient center of Pañamarca, discovered
by Trever's research team in 2010