Chavin Culture (900-200 bce) Ceramic

[M S Smith]

Just found this incredible photo of a ceramic piece from the Chavin Culture (900-200 bce). I would love to see more items if anyone has them.

~Michael~

[afungitobewith]

A friend made this

Edited March 29, 2014 by afungitobewith

[trucha]

Douglas Sharon's thin book on San Pedro archaeology shows somewhere around 5 or 6 different variants of that particular stirrup vessel. Many of those particular artifacts were mass produced using molds for their parts. I suspect it was a handy form of labelling for a largely illiterate audience?

Sharon's book has the most number of images of stirrup vessels that feature san pedro imagery than I've seen anywhere else. I'd imagine that the National Museum in Lima has more.

Its easy to imagine what some were used for due to them depicting disease states or suggesting a botanical IDs for their contents but those showing elements such as the act of fellatio being performed are not so clear in an intended application.

Sharon's work is out of print but it might be worth contacting the Museum of Man in San Diego and asking if they still have any copies left.

Its just not worth the $99 price tag at:

http://www.amazon.com/Shamanism-Sacred-Cactus-Ethnoarchaeological-Shamanismo/dp/0937808741

If I had access to my library I'd be happy to scan and post that page but its still packed in boxes.

Edited March 31, 2014 by trucha

[M S Smith]

Ha ha ha ha...Sharon's book has that piece on its cover. Shit I probably have scans of the images you mention, and probably from photocopies from you. I'm such a ditz.

~Michael~

[Quixote]

but those showing elements such as the act of fellatio being performed are not so clear in an intended application.

Is that piece from the Chavin culture specifically?

It seems they were putting all kinds of stuff on their pottery, cacti were just a small part of the motifs. Heck, from what I see online, it wasn't a cactus-religion, it was a sex cult

Edited April 2, 2014 by Quixote

[Quixote]

Just found this incredible photo of a ceramic piece from the Chavin Culture (900-200 bce). I would love to see more items if anyone has them.

Chavin Ceramic 900- 200 B.C. - The Art Institute of Chicago.jpg

~Michael~

I think it's interesting to see that all the cacti on that piece have exactly 4 ribs. Maybe it's just easier to craft, maybe it's because the cacti is a Bridgesii?

[Optimystic]

good observation!

things that make ya go hrm...

[Quixote]

I did some googling and found this, maybe you saw it already?

[hookahhead]

While trying to track down a digital copy of Sharon's book, I came across this. Thought you might be interested in it as well?

Chavín: Art, Architecture, and Culture (Cotsen Monograph)

This book is the first in more than a decade to provide new information on the Chavín phenomenon of ancient Peru. Thought by some to be the "Mother Culture" of ancient Peruvian cultures, Chavín is remarkable for its baroque, sophisticated art style in a variety of media, including finely carved stone monuments, beautifully formed pottery, and magnificent and complex metallurgy. Also, the textiles from Chavín are incredibly innovative, both iconographically and structurally. They, in fact, form the foundation for the later Andean textile evolution. Chapters in this book cover new interpretations of the history of the site of Chavín de Huantar, studies of related cultures, the role of shamanism, and many other topics of interest to specialists and the general reader, alike.

It's not the full book, but the first few pages have already piqued my interest.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57030275/Chavin09-libre.pdf

Edited April 3, 2014 by hookahhead

[Myeloblast]

Very cool, thanks for posting hookahhead. Looking forward to reading this

Edited April 3, 2014 by Myeloblast

[Micromegas]

The culture that produced the pottery depicting diverse sexual scenes was not Chavin but rather the Mochica. San Pedro does not appear in mochica pottery except, possibly, as representations of snails that live on the tops of some species of trichocerues, but this is conjecture by some archaeologists.

Also, no textiles exist from chavin culture explicitly because chavin is a highland society and textiles preserve very poorly in that damp environment. Textiles that show chavin motifs are from Ica culture, or possibly from cultures in the Jequetepeque Valley (or were traded from chavin, but more likely produced at the coast since stone was not as easy to come by in that environment so they replicated chavin monolithic stonework in textile as cotton was prolific and grown in irrigated fields in the coastal desert with streams coming out of the andes), which was obviously influenced by chavin but 500+ kms away, which is significant in itself as it demonstrates the incredible and long lasting reach of chavin ideology.

Quixote, your photo is almost certainly not of chavin origin it looks more like Huari or perhaps a coastal society but it is much more modern than chavin whatever the case and is unlikely to represent san pedro but it's a pretty acute observation you might be on to something. Chavin pottery is almost exclusively of a type called "blackware" which means it is is shiny and black like M S Smith's photo and did not contain much in the way of colour.

Mochica pottery is incredible and far better preserved than chavin because it is a more recent culture and the moche were also much more prodigious in their creation of pottery, indeed of all kinds of subjects but not, notably, san pedro although they did use Huachuma as a sacrament. I have a theory on that but man I wrote so much in the other thread! Mochica did not produce monolithic stone artwork but produce some incredible works in adobe since they lived on the coastal plain where sand and clay were more prominent than stone. Mochica pottery is occasionally but not often of a blackware style.

A lot of ceramics credited to Chavin is actually cupisnique culture which came just before chavin but was, again, coastal but was equally oriented around the Jaguar "cult" and may have heavily influenced the formation of the chavin ceremonial site but that is another huge topic. Cupisnique was also of a blackware style.

Depictions of san pedro are very rare in ANY culture although it's use was widespread throughout the Andes. That is a pretty curious fact. Chavin monolithic stonework provides the two best classical examples but there are a few others, but not many. I know of no other chavin pottery showing san pedro and i would be very interested to know if the one you have posted M S Smith is not indeed Cupisnique in origin.

Some of the chavin tenon heads have stalks of san pedro on the forehead. These also, of course, quite clearly show the effects of insufflating (?) anadenathera or possibly virola sp.

I wouldn't read too much into the number of ribs but you are right it does seem clearly depicted as having four ribs. However, on the stone sculpture of "Huachumero" it is fair to say the cactus is held in profile, and may be intended to have seven or even eight ribs.

This is one of my favourite topics, I have much to learn again I'm about 1/10th of where i'd like to be in understanding this so much of the above may be in error, hahaha. So I will stop now.

Richard Burger's book on Chavin is where you should look for a start if you are interested.

Looks like a good link hookahead i'll read it sometime.

Edit: on a quick breeze through of your (excellent) article hookahead the above ^^ is more or less confirmed by Torres re: pottery and textiles. Most pottery depicting san pedro is indeed cupisnique, curious because this was a coastal society where trichocereus does not grow. The closer you get to the source, perhaps, the less you need to represent? Most pottery uncovered at the site of Chavin has been brought as offering from elsewhere, not produced on site. His analysis of the Tello obelisk is a hotly debated topic among chavin aficionados I personally agree with his view re: Burgmansia but other interpretations see the floral representations on the obelisk to be chilli fruits and the roots of achira (Canna edulis). Again, a massive topic if only I didn't also have to work at something completely unrelated for a living!

Edited April 3, 2014 by Micromegas

[Micromegas]

This two are cool that I had never seen before, also cupisnique

> Cerámicas Cupisnique en donde se representan hombres con un tocado de felino sujetando el cactus trichocereus. El de la derecha tiene en la espalda las típicas ‘alas’ que se aprecian en las iconografías de algunas estelas en Chavín (Sharon 2001, Lumbreras 2007)

You could interpret them differently of course, maybe as flutes, rattles, staffs etc. but seems to fit the bill as a cactus.

Quixote turns out yours is Nazca. San pedro turns up more in Nazca art, possibly, in fact, in one of the huge "Nazca lines" but it's up for debate.

Edited April 7, 2014 by Micromegas

[Quixote]

Thanks Micromegas, for sharing your knowledge of this. It's really interesting.

Edited April 9, 2014 by Quixote

[gwalchgwyn]

Very interesting thread!

In the vein of relatedness to SA cultures and their use of plants, BK from SacredSucculents made some seed collections from what appears to be extensive farming at prehistoric SA sites, a sort of living archaeology. Not an ad, since I realize that most interested folks are already aware of SacredSucculents, but I thought relevant to the discussion. Anyone interested in what they've found, check out:

sacredsucculents.com/andean-ethnobotanical-collections/

(I messed up the link, but it's in the US domain WWW)

[Fenris]

This is the only picture of a ceramic I have but if anyone wants some pictures of the lintels and stuff from Chavin I have at least a dozen.

[mutant]

Interesting topic

Now where did all these cultures flourish?

The 4-ribbed scopulicola/bridgesii caught my eye at once. I was always interested in the myths about rib numbers, because it might as well prompt us to identify the species. So, the myth of the cacti of 4 winds, might signify that certain tribes knew that the 4 ribbed cacti were more spiritually powerful than 6-8 ribbed cousins from other areas.

So there comes the question about the origin of the first artifact by Smith, which clearly depicts 4-ribbed specimens, and most likely scops.

Also, Micromegas, besides all the interesting stuff he told us, he thought it was strange not more such artifacts were found. Not really, If you think a bit. We know the conqistadors tried to wipe out this satanic habits and rituals of eating certain cacti and plants and getting inebriated, but they could not - well they even managed to tranform some of them and even getting the cactus named San Pedro, but they could not make them stop their faith and tradition. But maybe they destroyed such artifacts, in an attempt to erase those cactus based religions from the map of history.

Erasing materials, documents, proof is much easier than erasing the spirit of a whole culture, or even destroy the plants themselves.

I know it sounds a bit conspiricy, but if you come to think of it, its not improbable. The christians fought to transform the populations wherever they went, and they fought to wipe out the old religion, where they could.

these cacti in the first artifact shout 4-winds so loudly , that its awesome. definately a scop

PS/edit: so I guess most are from peru

Edited April 11, 2014 by mutant

[mutant]

another one that suggests scop. Tell me could it be a spiny cactus and he could hold it like this ??

This two are cool that I had never seen before, also cupisnique

You could interpret them differently of course, maybe as flutes, rattles, staffs etc. but seems to fit the bill as a cactus.

Quixote turns out yours is Nazca. San pedro turns up more in Nazca art, possibly, in fact, in one of the huge "Nazca lines" but it's up for debate.

[Micromegas]

Also, Micromegas, besides all the interesting stuff he told us, he thought it was strange not more such artifacts were found. Not really, If you think a bit. We know the conqistadors tried to wipe out this satanic habits and rituals of eating certain cacti and plants and getting inebriated, but they could not - well they even managed to tranform some of them and even getting the cactus named San Pedro, but they could not make them stop their faith and tradition. But maybe they destroyed such artifacts, in an attempt to erase those cactus based religions from the map of history.

Hi mutant, it's a good theory but in many ways it does not really hold up. True, the conquistadors did destroy huge amounts of artwork and associated ideology of the cultures they plundered. Sometimes to extirpate this religion (especially the friars that came with the conquistadors to set up missions), in other cases just in the hunt for gold or valuable items (the soldiers/generals etc.). This was usually with respect to living cultures, not those of the archaic past. In Peru this relates most explicitly to the Incas, in Mexico, quite spectacularly to the Aztecs.

There are cases where archaic sites were plundered. The temple of the sun, at the Moche site in the Moche valley for example, had an entire river diverted through it in the hunt for gold. But even at that site the complementary temple, the temple of the moon, was left untouched. The Moche complex El Brujo, by comparison, was only excavated in the 1980s in any serious way at the Huaca Cao. It's complementary site, the Huaca Cortada is, again, entirely unexcavated. Similarly, in Mexico, the museum at Palenque as well as the friezes that still remain on site, contains hundreds of very large friezes and murals that were unharmed by colonization to a large degree, in which only tobacco use is explicitly represented.The site at Chavin was buried under earth until the 1920s, and after being unearthed by Tello was then half buried again in a landslide in the 1940s. Only 50 odd years ago did "El Huachumero" enter modern (western) consciousness...

So rather than all the relevant art being destroyed, it may be that it has yet to be discovered and may reflect a bias by archaeologists to focus on their own themes - power and hierarchy - because of the status quo of the educational milieu in which they were raised. But my feeling is that hallucinogenic plant representations may simply be less common than other subjects.

Because these sites were ancient and much of the ideology lost to time even to the inhabitants in those countries when the conquistadors arrived, the brunt of the idolatry was focused on the living cultures - aztecs and incas as stated above. My knowledge of mexican cultures is poor compared to those in Peru, so I will leave that country alone...

In Peru, the actions of the conquistadors alone is nowhere near enough to explain why hallucinogenic plants do not appear more commonly on monolithic or portable art when artworks of all sorts of other subjects - including those high religious significance - are extant.

Indeed, looters in Peru through the 20th century have caused far more damage to archaic sites than did the conquistadors, who undeniably crushed the cultures they found alive in the places they visited; in a stunning paradox, the capital cities of the Incas and Aztecs are less well preserved than those that came hundreds of years before, although the oral traditions of the more modern cultures have obviously been retained in some vestige, whereas there is no oral tradition of, say, the people who founded the ancient city of Caral on the Peruvian coast. But "grave robbers" have done untold damage to pre-columbian sites.

Now, nor can it be that as cultures supplanted other cultures - i.e. Moche - Sican - Chimu - Inca - they selectively destroyed all artifacts representing hallucinogenic plants only. Certainly, many structures were razed, usually by the same cultures that built them, and you could make an outside case that those cultures themselves destroyed their own plant representations but even in that case, they did not dig up archaic sites, tombs etc. etc. That is, hundreds of thousands of pieces remained intact...

The Moche site of Sipan is a classic example, where in the 1990s archaeologists uncovered a series of elaborate burials that fully supported scenes appearing in moche art that until that time most people considered to be only metaphors. These related to sacrifice and blood letting and hierarchical structures, and actually some intriguing plant references appear in such scenes.

But still, relatively few hallucinogenic plant representations exist in most archaic cultures that nevertheless are likely to have used those plants as an important component of their societies. Instead, shamanic states are inferred - jaguars, flying shamans, transformational beings, curing sessions, deities, bulging eyes, mucous dripping from the nose, mortars, cups, snuff containers and trays etc. But not, really, much in the way of plants themselves in an explicit sense compared to other subjects such as food plants, animals, boats and rafts (fishing cultures), deities, ceremonial objects, portraits, geometrical designs, many of which are carved on the items used in plant ingestion (i.e. jaguars on mortars) etc. etc....

And so on and so on. The (modern) artwork of the Huichol in northern Mexico, and Cupisnique/Chavin buck the trend, and possibly the Nazca and Tiwanku to a much lesser degree, although opinion is very divided on the last two. The case of Moche and the deer hunting scene featuring what appears to be anadenanthera is a curious one, especially since snuffing paraphernalia does not appear in moche art... which is another subject in itself.

Like I said I have a theory on the matter in its nascent stage but this is a massive subject to get into I can't really do it here and quite frankly I do not have a good enough grasp on the subject matter.

So there a few options, (1) the art may have been selectively destroyed, (2) the art is yet to be discovered (3) I may be completely wrong and hallucinogenic plant representations are common enough not to pose any mystery (4) archaeologists have a bias against exposing archaic plant use or (5) there is some particular reason why representation of hallucinogenic plant use is inferred rather than explicitly botanically identified in art in the cultures that almost certainly used these plants extensively and knew a great deal about their curative and ideological potential.

While I think the answer is a mixture of all I lean toward 3 or 5!!

As always, I haven't covered all or even most of the relevant material and hold the right in reserve to reassess facts as I discover new information and also to entirely change my opinion if required!

Edited April 14, 2014 by Micromegas

[Micromegas]

Also fenris, that ceramic is Moche. Also I never say no to seeing photos of Chavin!

[M S Smith]

Found this neat one while digging around...

Cupisnique Culture (1000 BC – 200 AD)

~Michael~

[Quixote]

So there a few options, (1) the art may have been selectively destroyed, (2) the art is yet to be discovered (3) I may be completely wrong and hallucinogenic plant representations are common enough not to pose any mystery (4) archaeologists have a bias against exposing archaic plant use or (5) there is some particular reason why representation of hallucinogenic plant use is inferred rather than explicitly botanically identified in art in the cultures that almost certainly used these plants extensively and knew a great deal about their curative and ideological potential.

While I think the answer is a mixture of all I lean toward 3 or 5!!

While I'm no expert, I think the answer might be found in the way they were thinking about the world around them. Nowadays, we say that a specific plant has a specific property, that the effect is inside the plant.

To a shamanistic culture, I suppose the effect would not be seen as being "inside" the plant, the plant would merely reveal what was real all along: the spirit world. This was the important thing and the focus of their religious art.

Just like the ancient Romans did not worship grapes, they worshiped Bacchus, the god of intoxication. The grapes merely made his presence felt.

Edited May 6, 2014 by Quixote

[slice]

stirrup vessels

Edited May 6, 2014 by slice

[Micromegas]

To a shamanistic culture, I suppose the effect would not be seen as being "inside" the plant, the plant would merely reveal what was real all along: the spirit world. This was the important thing and the focus of their religious art.

Hey Quixote, that's more or less where my theory was headed as well.

Food plants, by comparison are the thing-in-itself so to speak so they are more frequently represented.

Just like the ancient Romans did not worship grapes, they worshiped Bacchus, the god of intoxication. The grapes merely made his presence felt.

Interesting.

I have been looking into this some more though and there's some strong evidence mushrooms are frequently represented in mesomaerican art including the aztec codices and the "mushroom stones" of guatemala. Turns out there's some pretty interesting stuff going on with the Nazca as well.

[Quixote]

Hey Quixote, that's more or less where my theory was headed as well.

Food plants, by comparison are the thing-in-itself so to speak so they are more frequently represented.

Interesting.

I have been looking into this some more though and there's some strong evidence mushrooms are frequently represented in mesomaerican art including the aztec codices and the "mushroom stones" of guatemala. Turns out there's some pretty interesting stuff going on with the Nazca as well.

I read somewhere that the Aztecs called certain mushrooms "The flesh of the gods", which might imply that they considered the mushrooms themselves to be divine. Maybe different cultures at different times had different ways of looking at it. I find it very interesting to try to imagine how they were thinking back then. The Aztecs especially with their (from our perspective) absolutely grotesque rituals.

All of this is conjecture of course, but there might be a fundamental difference between mushrooms and cacti: The cacti are clearly plants like other plants, they grow from seeds that you can see with the naked eye, they grow during many years, and they flower and set fruits. In that way, they seem part of the material world. Even without scientific education, we feel that we "understand" them in a way.

Mushrooms, on the other hand, always had a shady reputation, at least in Europe, since they seem to appear as by magic. They grow so quickly that it looks like they just appear overnight, they don't have anything like flowers or fruits that we can recognise, and their spores are so tiny that at best we perceive it as a kind of dust. To create life from dust, isn't that what we also today call divine? So, my point is that mushrooms naturally lend themselves more to be seen as divine, something not part of our natural world.

Well, something to think about at least.

Edited May 21, 2014 by Quixote

[Micromegas]

I like the mushroom theory.

Turns out ancient art of shamanic plants are however a bit more prevalent than I originally expected in the art of south and central America and the situation is, also, much more complicated than I anticipated, as it ties in with the spread, support and maintenance of hierarchical, ideologically facilitated power systems in the Americas - why certain plants would be so utilised, represented and deified in art...

Each culture appears to form its own matrix into which various plants have been inserted or omitted, and the convergences and divergences of representations of plants in art and associated paraphernalia (that surely represent their importance in use) may speak very fundamentally about the ideological/power relationships, ceremonial structure and ethos of those cultures when viewed comparatively. This is true from the san pedro cactus all the way down to the humble lima bean.

All I have now is a pile of tangential thoughts that will need some serious fleshing out and looking into, so I will hold my tongue for the time being or i will be talking unsubstantiated nonsense!

Edited May 27, 2014 by Micromegas