The Philosopher on the Throne

Catherine the Great, an Empress of Russia.  

Catherine was born in the spring of 1729 as Sophie Fredericke Auguste and married the crown prince of Russia in 1745.  Soon after her husband, Peter II, ascended to the throne, Catherine staged a coup d’état (Hughes 2008).  After taking control of Russia, Catherine began a major building campaign as well as supporting literature and the arts and creating initiatives towards improving education.

Catherine accomplished many great things during her time in power, including beginning a world-class art gallery at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, building throughout Russia, and seizing on any opportunity that she could to expand Russia’s empire.  Most notably, this included a religious war with the Turks in the 1780s as well as the annexation of Crimea.  Catherine’s political power found Russia allying at times with Austria and against Great Britain, symbols of a new and old colonial power, respectively.

While Catherine was obviously a woman of power in a male-dominated society, it probably seems strange to select an example like Catherine the Great as our final case study, but in some regards, imperial Russia was very similar to the Moche.  Catherine, like the Moche, struggled to create wealth for her society.  Furthermore, Catherine valued artistry, and as we have seen from the artifacts that survived the Moche culture, it was a valued commodity for them as well.  Additionally, Catherine did not hesitate to use violence to achiever her goals of expansion, something that we also saw as a characteristic of the Moche in relation to resource availability. The Moche lived in river basins on the coast of Peru the areas that had the most access to plentiful resources because outside of those coastal planes, resources were difficult to find (Talley 2002).  Indeed, the expansions of the Russian empire added resource-rich lands to be added to Russian domain, expanding its industrial capacity.

However, one of the biggest connections between Catherine and the Moche is the fact that they both believed in a class structure (Shimida 1994).  As we have seen throughout Moche iconography, there is a structure of power among all of the depicted persons.  In the sacrifice scene, for instance, there are priests who maintain utmost power and the highest social structure.  Catherine is noted historically for decreasing the quality of life for Russian serfs, the slaves who were tied to tracks of land.  Catherine believed in a social structure that was based upon birthright and that anyone below her in the social structure was subservient.

Catherine still remains archaeologically relevant today because in the middle of her reign she established the Hermitage, a leading art museum in the world. The museum was built in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and houses pieces from Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian and Michelangelo (Hughes 2008). However, in one of her ventures to obtain more paintings, Catherine's vessel crashed of the coast of Finland with several paintings of Dutch masters. The shipwreck was found in 1999 and has not be excavated because of disagreements of who the recovered paintings should belong to. This is akin to the controversy surrounding the Getty Bronze. Who owns antiquities when they are discovered in shipwrecks? The originating country, the country that discovers it or the country in whose water it is found? Watch this video to see the discussion.

Sources:

Hughes, L. (2008). The Romanovs: Ruling Russia 1613-1917. London: Hambledon Continuum.

Shimada, I. (1994). Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Talley, S. R. (2002). The pyramid of doom: an ancient murder mystery. In Mummies and Pyramids: Egypt and Beyond [Motion picture]. United States: World Almanac Video

Priestess Burial in San Jose de Moro

In 1991 the tombs of women priestess were found in San Jose de Moro. This discovery by archeologist suggest that some of the women in the Moche were very powerful and that the power did not completely lie in the hands of men in Moche society. The tombs of the Moche priestesses were filled with many quality goods such as metal and also other human sacrifices. The women were buried with attire and alongside many ornaments that were represented in iconography found by archeologist. For example the women were buried with sacrificial goblets which are often represented in Moche iconography. Before the discovery of the priestess, many archeologists were left to question the role of women in Moche society and their prominence and importance in society. In one of the tombs lie a 40 year old female in a cane coffin. This priestess was surrounded by 5 other females in her coffin. She also buried with Spondylus shells, necklaces, metal objects, and ceramic vessels. The second tomb was occupied by a very young priestess who was around 7 years old. This young priestess is also surrounded by other corpses (both boys and girls). She is also surrounded by metal and ceramic vessels.
With the discovery of these tombs, archeologist are able to confirm that these priestesses were very well respected and achieved high status in the Moche society.

Female Iconography in Casas Grandes

Casas Grandes, a society that covered much of Northwestern Mexico and the Southwestern United States during 1200 AD to 1450 AD,is very unique to its surrounding Mesoamerican societies. Most of these other cultures, for example the Maya, seem to deemphasize the power of women in both aspects of reproduction and also their contributions to society and ritual. The human effigies found in the Casas Grandes areas seem to accurately represent human activities and different individuals or supernatural/mythical beings, with reference to important women participation in society. Christine and Todd VanPool found significant differences in posture, body size, and body decoration between both male and female genders and two other "in betweens." Some distinguishing features happen to be the exaggeration of primary and secondary sex characteristics of males and females and the activities (very often related to biological sex) portrayed by the humans in the vessels.

All of the males in these effigies are identified as "smokers" which indicates that they could be smoking hallucinogens which would induce a trance used by shamans to travel between the worlds.

Many of the vessels that portray women contain a bird motif that is also associated with the shamanic journey. This bird is said to be a guardian animal that helps the shaman through the journey between the material and spiritual worlds. An interpretation is that the female, because of her association with the bird, is a caregiver and acts as a guardian of the shaman's spirit and physical body during the shamanic rituals and transformations.

The VanPools make a distinction of the people of the Casas Grandes that their society had aspects of gender dualism and that the genders complemented each other. The horned snake is associated with males while the macaw head is associated with women - the shaman effigy has both of these symbols which can be viewed as gender complementarity. Although the snake and the bird can be seen as masculine and feminine symbols respectively, they are not in opposition of each other. Males and females reflect a "unified cosmological structure based on balance between feminine and masculine" (VanPool 2006).

The human effigies elude to the activities that both men and women performed. Even more importantly, grave goods found at these sites "did not reflect a sexual division of labor or systematic differences in gender based statuses" (VanPool 2006). The fact that the women portrayed in the vessels have accentuated sexual characteristics suggests that fertility in women could have been just as important as shamanism.

As we can see from the explicit gender symbolism, gender was an important aspect of social life in Casas Grandes. However, the complementarity in gender creates an ideological equality between the two. It is important to view gender not as solely social identity but as a social structure.

With the Moche, we have discovered the role of women and the social roles that they have taken on, especially the Priestess seen in the recurring sacrifice scene of their iconography. The recurring themes and iconography of Moche ceramics occurs in the Casas Grandes society, as well. Although it may not be as clear that distinct women held positions of power, a part of their gender was not only in the shamans, but they did take part in the rituals of the society, which we see with the participation of women in the sacrifice scene. With a dualistic complimentary society between females and males and birds and serpents, women did hold power in that they were the guardians of the shamans on their spiritual travels. The emphasis of their importance is obvious and the society benefited from their complementarity in creating the social structure of class and differentiation in Casas Grandes.

References

Gender in Middle Range Societies: A Case Study in Casas Grandes Iconography

Christine S. VanPool and Todd L. VanPool

American Antiquity
Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jan., 2006), pp. 53-75

Published by: Society for American Archaeology

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40035321

The Shaman-Priests of the Casas Grandes Region, Chihuahua, Mexico

Christine S. VanPool

American Antiquity
Vol. 68, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), pp. 696-717

Published by: Society for American Archaeology

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3557068

Not Everyone Is Laid To Rest

There are many different traits and characteristics of Moche funeral rituals. One would argue that there was a system that both the men and women worked by when burying the dead. For example the dead were usually buried in an extended supine position with their hands by their sides. Often the body was wrapped and carefully placed in a cane coffin or cane tube. People of the Moche society often buried certain goods such as food, ceramics, containers, etc along with the corpse. Although most graves were simple, some graves were more elaborate than others and featured more precious and exotic materials. Another custom of the funerary practices of the Moche was to bury people according to status and their roles throughout their lives.
In most cases the body of the deceased was buried shortly after the death. Recently, many archeologists have been forced to question whether all corpses were buried within a short time of their death. Archeologist John Verano faced this battle when analyzing a grave site at Santuario de Sipan in which he discovered that five of the skeletons had been dead for a period of time before they were finally laid to rest. Out of these five corpses, three of them were adolescent women, who Verano claims had shifted inside of their coffins prior to or during the burial ceremony. Because of this shift, Verano was led to believe that the bodies of these women had already begun to decompose by the time that their final burial ceremony took place. In addition to these three women, there were many other burials at this grave site in Sipan that suggested that there was a delay in the actual burial of the body. Another way in which Verano was able to realize that burial of a corpse had been delayed was by insect pupae and fly eggs. The presence of the pupae said that there was time for the corpse to be contaminated and/or tampered with. Quiet often the sex of the deceased that had a delayed burial was women.
One may be led to ask the question of what were the cause and the reason for the delay of the burial of many of these women. There are an abundance of different possibilities about why most of these delayed burials belonged to women. In addition to reasons such as someone dying far away from home, or during a time in which the weather was just too bad or wet to appropriately bury someone, archeologist have come up with other hypothesis of why women had delayed burials. For example Verano encountered a grave site in which a cotton sash was found around the neck of the corpse indicating that the women was probably strangled and a human sacrifice. Along with the sash around her neck, the woman was buried with no cloth wrapped around her and she was laid in a cramped position. Many of these traits suggest that she was a voluntary or involuntary sacrifice to accompany the male in the tomb with her.
Another way in which human bodies were manipulated in Moche graves was by the reopening of the graves. There are several reasons why graves of both men and women were said to be re-opened. For example some graves were re-opened years later in order to renew offerings. Recently an archeologist uncovered a grave site in which a woman who was buried in Moche III, her grave was re-opened in Moche IV and many of her offerings were renewed. She was also accompanied by the corpse of a man. The fact that it is common to find that a grave has been re-opened speaks to the way that the Moche perceived the dead and after-life. To the Moche, the grave is not just a sight for a decaying corpse, but it is a resting place for an ancestor that should be well groomed and respected.

Moche iconography: approaches to interpretation and depictions of high-status females

Between c. 100 CE and c. 700 CE, the Moche culture arose, thrived, and collapsed on the north coast of modern Peru. During that time, they created spectacularly decorated ceramics and murals endowed with intricate iconography whose significance is still being debated today. Without written language (although see Melka 2010 for a review of the hypothesis that enigmatic pottery decorated with lima beans served as a form of communication), the Moche created a seemingly infinite variety of characters and depictions. The many extant ceramic artifacts and murals seem a great place to begin examining women in Moche culture.

However, a problem has already arisen. How can we make sense of Moche iconography given the diversity of depiction? Christopher Donnan in 1976 proposed a thematic approach, in which recurrent symbolic representations across artifacts (such as identifiable characters and motifs) constitute “themes.” For example, the Nativity Theme in Western art has certain characteristics - the manger, the Magi, the baby Jesus - that identify it as a Nativity theme (quoted in Shimada 1994). The characters and motifs may look slightly different across media and time, but are still intelligible. Using this approach, numerous themes like the Burial Theme (see Donnan and McClelland 1979) become intelligible.

The thematic approach is not without its flaws. There is no strict definition of a theme, too much focus is given to single characteristics, and not all ceramics may depict narrative scenes (Quilter 1997). Jeffery Quilter (1997) offers an extension, the narrative approach, that attempts to reconstruct Moche myths using ceramic depiction as well as ethnohistorical data. For example, depictions of baby Jesus, the manger, and the Magi could be interpreted as the story of an important infant born in humble surroundings whose who is visited by three high-status men.

Now we have two theoretical approaches scholars have used to interpret Moche iconography. What can they tell us about the position of women in Moche culture?

Women appear in numerous Moche depictions. Hocquenghem and Lyon (1980) identify a supernatural woman (at left), characterized by two long, bound locks of hair that terminate in snakes’ heads, who is depicted prominently across four themes: the Presentation Theme, the Revolt of the Objects Theme, the Moon/Boat Theme, and the Burial Theme. See, for instance, this depiction of the Presentation Theme, in which she is labeled C. A narrative approach to the Revolt of the Objects scenes gives similar prominence to the supernatural female. Quilter (1997:128) mentions her several times in his reconstructed narrative: “The Lord of the Ulluchus and the Woman caused the natural order to be reversed” and “none was safe from the revolt of the objects. The captured warriors were dragged before the Woman and the Lord of the Ulluchus… [and] sacrificed.”

Ethnohistorical data supports the hypothesis that women held positions of power in Moche culture. The Burial Theme often depicts a supine female figure being pecked by birds (see upper-left corner). Donnan and McClelland (1979) report that Antonio de la Calancha wrote in 1638 that healers who had lost patients through malpractice were killed, their bodies left for the birds. Thus, the female depicted in the Burial Theme may be a high-status healer (Donnan and McClelland 1979). Unfortunately, those eaten by birds in the first millennium are unlikely to be represented in the archaeological record.

If women did hold high-status positions in Moche culture, as the iconography seems to indicate, we would expect funerary remains to do the same. In fact, burials of high-status Moche women have been excavated. At San José de Moro, multiple high-status female burials were excavated in the early 1990s. Grave goods indicated not only that the women in two tombs were priestesses, but that they could be identified with the supernatural woman depicted in the Presentation Theme (Bourget 2006:13). The grave goods found in the first tomb give some indication of the priestess’ status: copper feathers in a ceremonial headdress, a copper goblet similar to that used in depictions of the sacrifice ceremony, jewelry, and a funerary mask (Castillo 2006). These goods indicate that “the elite women of San José de Moro were wealthy and important, and that their importance seems to have stemmed from their own social roles and conditions, not from their association with powerful men“ (Castillo 2006:3).

The strong relation between depictions of women of power in Moche iconography and burials of high-status women point to the same conclusion: that women were could and did hold positions of power and prestige in Moche culture.

References:

Bourget, S. 2006. Sex, Death, and Sacrifice in Moche Religion and Visual Culture. University of Texas Press.

Castillo, L. J. 2006 Five Sacred Priestesses from San José de Moro: Elite Women Funerary Rituals on Peru’s North Coast. In Revista electrónica de arqueología PUCP.

Donnan, C. B. and D. McClelland. 1979. The Burial Theme in Moche iconography. In Studies in Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology 21:5-46.

Hocquenghem, A. M. and P. J. Lyon. 1980. A class of anthropomorphic supernatural females in Moche iconography. In Ñawpa Pacha 18:27-47.

Melka, T. S. 2010. The Moche lima beans recording system, revisited. In Electronic Journal of Folklore 45:89-136.

Quilter, J. 1997. The narrative approach to Moche iconography. In Latin American Antiquity 8:112-113.

Shimada, I. 1994. Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture. University of Texas Press.

A powerful woman and an disrespected death

In 1508 BC, a girl was born to the royal family of Egypt.  They named her Hatshepsut, meaning the noblest of ladies.  Hatshepsut married her brother, Tuthmose II, who shortly after his coronation and shortly after his father, Pharoah Tuthmose I, died.  When her husband died, the question of ascension came to the forefront as Hatshepsut claimed to be her father’s heir, not her nephew and stepson Thutmose III, because Thutmose III was too young to rule.

Hatshepsut reigned from 1479 BC until her death in 1458 BC.  During this time, she presented herself as a male, partially in order to prove her legitimacy as a pharaoh.  All iconography depicting Hatshepsut deemphasizes her breasts and feminine qualities.  She even wore the false beard of a pharaoh.

Before Hatshepsut became pharaoh, a royal tomb was built for in the Valley of the Kings, but after she ascended to the throne, her tomb was deemed unworthy for a pharaoh.  Therefore, when she died, Hatshepsut was buried with her father in his tomb, KV20, which was discovered by Howard Carter in 1903.

In ordinary circumstances, Hatshepsut’s death would have been the end of her story, but unfortunately, these were not ordinary circumstances.  Because of her unusual rise to the throne, she delayed Tuthmose III’s ascension to the throne for two decades, something that Egyptologists cite for the destruction of all iconography relating to Hatshepsut shortly after her death.

Tuthmose III had all remaining images of Hatshepsut destroyed, defaced her name everywhere, and removed it from all records.  In 1907, archaeologists found blocks with her name still visible beneath the cartouche of Tuthmose III, the first evidence of her being pharaoh that had been found.

After the blocks were found, archaeologists re-examined Hatshepsut’s burial temple.  The first thing that the archaeologist’s noticed was that the record of Hatshepsut’s Sed-festival, or the festival that celebrates the continued rule of a pharaoh, showed a joint celebration including Hatshepsut and Tuthmose III, which appears unaltered.

Upon further study, the archaeologists discovered that Tuthmose I, Hatshepsut’s father was removed from his tomb during Tutmose III’s reign to a new tomb, KV 38. The scenes of Hatshepsut and Tuthmose III were unaltered, indicating that the scenes did actually happen, or that they were put there after Hatshepsut's death and Tuthmose I was removed from the tomb.

Although Hatshepsut was buried and mummified as a pharaoh, her successor did not want her remembered as such.  Hatshepsut’s story is interesting because although she was a woman of power in her lifetime, after her death she was treated as anything but one.  Although Egyptologists list her reign as being one of the most successful, her body was not treated that way.  This is in contrast to the studies of the Inca kings who were revered after their deaths.  Additionally, the treatment of Hatshepsut is in direct contrast to the treatment of the iconography of women by the Moche, who our main study is about.  First, there was no iconography representing Hatshepsut as a woman and second, the iconography that was left was destroyed by the people who came after her rule.

Sources:
http://www.thebanmappingproject.com/sites/browse_tomb_834.html
http://www.jstor.org/stable/542272
http://www.jstor.org/stable/543914