Archaeologists have revealed a new hoard of wall paintings at Pañamarca, a pillared hall on a rocky outcrop in the lower Nepeña Valley in northern Peru. A series of murals feature a two-faced man wearing a golden headdress and elaborate sash holding a fan of red and yellow feathers. In the upper painting, the figure holds a cup of flowers feeding four hummingbirds in one hand. The character carries a weapon or quipu, an indigenous digital accounting device, in the lower part, and its feathered fan is curved. Historians speculate that the images, which date back nearly 1,400 yearscould represent artists’ attempts to experiment with the representation of movement or storytelling.
Principal Investigators Jessica Ortiz Zevallos, the Peruvian director of Archaeological Research Project (PIA); Michele Koons, curator of archeology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science; and Lisa Trever, professor of pre-Columbian art history and archeology at Columbia University, discussed their team’s work at an annual meeting in January 2023 at the Institute of Andean Studies at Berkley. , in California.
“What caught our team’s attention, however, was the pillar painted with this two-faced person, never seen before in lousy art or any other pre-Hispanic tradition in the Andean region,” Zevallos said. . Hyperallergic discoveries of the PIA on the site.
Created between 550 and 800 CE, Pañamarca is unlike any other ceremonial center in the Moche Civilization (300–850 CE), known for its artists and artisans. The artists created these vast paintings that line the walls after smoothing and plastering the walls and pillars of the adobe temple. After the section was painted white, painters drew supernatural, mythological, or human figures on the surface using sharp tools to make incisions before coloring the outlines.
Along with the image of the Two-Faced Man, archaeologists exposed new murals on previously excavated pillars in 2010. They identified the Moche ‘priestess’. Beyond the murals, PIA also uncovered pieces of feathers and stripped textiles likely brought to the coast from distant communities. Their research suggests that ugly culture was much more diverse than previously thought.
“Not only do we see Pañamarca artists breaking the typical lousy art mold, we also have physical evidence that these social bonds were a reality and not just part of the artistic imagination,” Trever said.
Scientists have been studying Pañamarca since the 1950s, hoping to understand and document these people who lived hundreds of years before the Inca Empire. In 1958, archaeologists Hans Horkheimer and Duccio Bonavia discovered painted wall fragments of a priestess participating in a sacrificial ceremony. However, the walls had collapsed by the time archaeologists returned in 2010; the researchers had not sufficiently preserved the site. Since 2018, PIA has been working to discover more about the site, its architecture and its environmental history. The team simultaneously digs and protects the decorated walls without applying chemicals. At the end of each season, the team rebury everything.
Although they’ve found so much, PIA knows there’s a lot more to know about the Moche civilization. Even in Pañamarca, the excavated pillars represent less than 10% of the total murals in Pañamarca. In future seasons, the team hopes to finish exposing the rest of the pillars, some featuring more murals with the Two-Faced Man, and move on to excavating Moche community plazas.
“When we were doing this work, we could see that in the right corner, the other side of the pillar was also painted with a similar image,” Trever said. “We could only see the edge of the straight feather fan and the hand holding it.”
