The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru

This volume is split into two parts, the first detailing historical engagement (mainly from the nineteenth century on) with the Moche site of Pañamarca on the north coast of Peru (which contains murals dating from ca. 600–800 CE and was occupied by the Moche earlier, the dates of which are unknown), the second detailing the findings of the 2010 field excavation and conservation campaign carried out by Lisa Trever, Jorge Gamboa, Ricardo Toribio, and Ricardo Morales. In part 1, Trever presents the history of Pañamarca's place in our knowledge of Moche mural painting and visual culture. Trever delves into the context of mural finds at the site, recovering and recounting the times that adventurers, scholars, and looters uncovered painted adobe walls among the architectural remains.The unfortunate truth is that these finds, once seen and only sometimes photographed or drawn, were often left to the vicissitudes of weather and humanity, resulting in an astounding loss of artistic heritage. Trever painstakingly recounts the history of these discoveries, recovering not only what was revealed but how those discoveries were turned into representations to be disseminated and how they were interpreted at the time within Moche studies and through cultural movements within Peru. In a clear, compelling voice, she traces the genealogy of these reproductions and interpretations, demonstrating the changes and distortions that occurred from field observations, photographs, and even tracings to the images that were reproduced in newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and postcards. The art history of Pañamarca is not just in analysis of the ancient murals but in the way that modern representations of the murals were created, distributed, and used. This positioning of the site historically interleaves with part 2, as the 2010 excavation was based on the known mural locations, and traces of earlier investigators—35 millimeter film wrappers, card stock daubed with paint colors made to record murals—were found in the initial layers of their work.Part 2 reports on the excavation and its findings. While the stated purpose of recovering and conserving what remained of the previously found murals was achieved, the team also uncovered murals never before seen and added considerably to our knowledge of Moche mural painting materials and methods. Tantalizingly, there is also ample evidence of more murals at Pañamarca that await further discovery. The interplay between the two parts is an important aspect of the book. Part 1 is more literary, telling a story that spans two centuries and involves important and colorful figures from Peru's past. Part 2's drier nature is to be expected of an excavation report, but this part often refers back to part 1 in a way that shows how a site is connected to not only the ancient but also the recent past: murals only half-described or mentioned in passing by explorers were recovered and documented; a wall was found with evidence of documentation, but no record of it appears in the archival materials; and the murals (those newly discovered and remnants of earlier finds) were this time conserved rather than being left to destruction and decay. The report gives a full accounting of all murals found in the course of the excavation, with abundant color photographs and drawings as well as a bibliography for each of the murals that had appeared previously in publication, an immensely useful addition. Materials suitable for 12 carbon dates were recovered, the data for which is given in full as a series of appendixes, along with a table that presents the relative chronology of the painting phases in the previously unknown mural site, the Temple of the Painted Pillars.The book's conclusion begins to integrate the Pañamarca murals into a larger perspective of Moche art, noting the connections between these paintings and ceramic styles and mural traditions from the Moche and Chicama river valleys further north. A deeper dive into this aspect of Pañamarca's art history would have been useful, as well as a contextualization within the mural tradition in the Andes in general, which is touched on only briefly in the introduction.The discovery of new murals at the site has doubled the Pañamarca corpus, and for the documentation of this alone, the book is an important one. It is also useful as a model of art history and archaeology working together—melding archaeological fieldwork and interpretation with art historical methods and goals. By tracing the way that earlier representations of the Pañamarca murals were distributed and consumed in the past, noting the stylistic connections with other sites and media, and observing the materiality of the murals themselves, the paintings are considered as both aesthetic objects and expressions of social, political, and religious institutions. This book will be of value to anyone interested in mural painting and visual culture in the ancient Americas but also to art history and archaeology students as a model of how to work in an interdisciplinary manner

Adventure · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology) · Excavation · Media studies · Mural · Newspaper · Painting · Sociology · Visual arts · Archaeology and Cultural Heritage · History · Public Spaces through Art