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.