Experts – both musicians and academics – are seeking to understand the basic principles of how these instruments were played. To this end, they are examining ancient frescoes and analyzing the instruments using X-ray and tomography techniques.
Almond-shaped eyes with purple spondylus shell pupils. Large nose, ears, and pointed head. Curled copper-wired whiskers are also attached to his face, and nacre (mother of pearl) is applied around the neckline. Unclothed with hands bound by a rope behind his back. The head is removable, which exposes the attached copper spatula and hollowed-out lower body. The fearsome Moche captured their enemy and humiliated them by removing their clothing and parading them before sacrifice. Removal of his head could symbolize the tribute of taking a trophy head.
This ear ornament, one of a pair, depicts a winged runner clutching a small cloth bag. Although it has been suggested that this figure may represent a human in a bird costume, it is more likely to portray an anthropomorphized bird, perhaps a hawk. The Moche (also known as the Mochicas) flourished on Peru’s North Coast from 200-850 CE, centuries before the rise of the Inca. Over the course of some six centuries they built thriving regional centers from the Nepeña River Valley in the south to perhaps as far north as the Piura River, near the modern border with Ecuador, developing coastal deserts into rich farmlands and drawing upon the abundant maritime resources of the Pacific Ocean’s Humboldt Current. Although the Moche never formed a single centralized political entity, they shared unifying cultural traits such as religious practices.
Archaeologists in the middle of the twentieth century dubbed the time when the Moche came to power as the “Mastercraftsman Period” for its striking technological innovations in the arts. Moche artists are well-known for their developments in metal working, but they also excelled at the creation of micro-mosaics, shaping tiny pieces of highly valued materials such as shell, turquoise, and other blue-green stones into tesserae that would be fitted into gold, silver, or wood supports. Here, the mosaic was worked into the large circular frontals of a pair of ear ornaments. Often called earspools, the frontals of these ornaments were attached to long tubular shafts that would have been inserted through the stretched earlobes of a high-status individual, a conspicuous display of the wearer’s power and position. For many years scholars believed that such ornaments were worn only by men; recent archaeological studies on Peru’s north coast, however, reveal that such ornaments were worn by certain high-status women as well.
The pair of ornaments was most likely worn with the (nearly identical) figures facing inward, toward the wearer. The bird’s face is executed in a dark turquoise, with eyes and beaks sheathed in gold. A chin strap fastens an elaborate tall trapezoidal headdress, which extends from a head band, itself bearing a projecting animal head. Graceful wings stretch out from the shoulders, and a rectangular element extending from the lower back likely represents tail feathers. Bracelets and a loincloth or short skirt are made of bright orange Spondylus shell, a vibrant contrast to the turquoise background. The figure holds a small bag, rendered in mother-of-pearl. The outstretched arms are positioned to suggest the vigorous pumping of a speedy runner, and the toes, in their swift movement, just grace the edges of the frontals. Darker inlays represent the runner’s body paint: the kneecaps are a dark turquoise, and the lower legs and feet are picked out in a royal blue mineral known as sodalite. Small hollow gold spheres made of sheet metal encircle the circumference of the frontals, echoing and enlivening the round composition.
The subject matter of these earspools is not well understood. Ritual running—either by a human or a zoomorphic protagonist—is one of the most frequently depicted activities in later Moche ceramics. In the absence of texts from this period (writing, as it is traditionally known, was not practiced in South America until the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century), the precise meaning of such imagery is unknown. The use of rare materials and the high level of craftsmanship evident in these ear ornaments, however, would have definitively marked the wearer as an individual of great importance. Turquoise, for example, may have been imported from sources as far away as northern Chile, and Spondylus—a bivalve closely associated with ideas of water and fertility—was imported into this region from warmer waters off the coast of northern Peru and Ecuador.
The dense tangle of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, in the state of Campeche, has guarded one of its best-preserved secrets for over a millennium. It is the ancient city of Minanbé, a settlement that remained hidden and untouched, without the hand of the modern looter ever profaning its structures, until a team of Mexican and Slovenian archaeologists managed to cut through the vegetation to document its existence.
The name of the site, a phrase in Yucatec Maya meaning there is no road, is not arbitrary but reflects the extreme difficulty the researchers faced in reaching the urban core, an odyssey that crowned three decades of work dedicated to surveying the Central Maya Lowlands.
The exploration of this enclave, which dates back to the Late Classic period (600–900 A.D.), was made possible thanks to the field season authorized by the Archaeology Council of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), an agency of Mexico’s Ministry of Culture.
The team, led by archaeologist Ivan Šprajc, affiliated with the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences, ventured into the northern sector of the reserve with a precise objective: to carry out a surface survey of a site located west of Chactún, a major center that the same project had reported thirteen years earlier. For this mission, they relied on a key technological tool: airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) data, which offered a view beneath the forest canopy.
Access to Minanbé, however, proved to be a titanic undertaking that tested the team’s endurance. Archaeologists Iván Šprajc, Atasta Flores Esquivel, Israel Chato López, Quintín Hernández Gómez, and Vitan Vujanović, along with workers from the community of Constitución, had to cut a path with machetes for five kilometers to be able to advance with ATVs, and then walk a similar distance under the extreme conditions of the tropical rainforest.
For Ivan Šprajc, the absence of so-called alleys—dirt roads opened decades ago for logging that on other occasions had guided them—was a hopeful sign. The lack of these access routes meant that the site had not been disturbed by recent human activity and, indeed, the discovery exceeded expectations.
Compared to other places where we conducted surface surveys, access here turned out to be much more difficult; however, in the last three years, this is the first one we found intact, there are no looters’ trenches, said the Slovenian archaeologist. It was a discovery, a great surprise for us, he added.
In 1987 the Peruvian police intercepted a series of gold objects from a looting.
The investigation leads to the conclusion that all these objects come from a funeral complex located in the Lambayeque valley, more precisely in the village of Sipán.
Archaeologist Walter Alva a specialist in the Mochica culture, was immediately alerted. The exceptional quality of the recovered objects leaves no doubt, we are facing a major discovery. About 35 km southeast of the city of Chiclayo, near the village of Sipán, stand the remains of the Huaca Rajada, a vast pyramid-shaped funerary complex built of adobe bricks. The structure has already suffered a lot of damage by the huaqueros (grave robbers) but the quick and muscular intervention (it took automatic gun fire to disperse the looters) of the police prevented the worst.
https://www.veroeddy.be/amerique-latine/perou/les-cultures-pre-incas/le-seigneur-de-sipan
This skull-shaped mask was made to be used in a ritual involving the Aztec god of death.
This rare example of an Aztec ritual mask was carved from wood over five centuries ago to represent Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death and lord of the underworld, who was always depicted with a skull face. Mictlantecuhtli was responsible for the souls of people who died "heroic deaths" in battle, sacrifice or childbirth, helping them navigate the nine levels of the underworld and find eternal rest.
According to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which has the mask in its collection, the carved wooden artifact measures 6.75 by 5.5 inches (17.2 by 14 centimeters). The sunken eyes with black pupils and the triangular nose give the mask a skull-like quality. On the cheeks, experts discovered traces of small, reddish dots that likely represent splotches of decay associated with Mictlantecuhtli. His teeth have been painted with vertical black lines, and both ears appear to have been pierced, as Mictlantecuhtli was often depicted with ear spools made of human bones.
Masks were an important part of ancient Aztec religion. In some rituals, people would wear masks of key deities, including carved skulls representing death, to transform themselves into supernatural beings. But because this particular mask of Mictlantecuhtli has no eye holes, it was probably affixed to a post or statue rather than worn, according to The Walters Art Museum, making it a rare example of a sculptural Aztec mask.
Mictlantecuhtli was a formidable part of the Aztec pantheon. He was said to be at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall and wore a necklace made of human eyeballs. When his full body was depicted, Mictlantecuhtli was shown with his arms raised, ready to tear apart the dead who entered his domain of Mictlan, the Aztec underworld. People who worshipped Mictlantecuhtli even practiced ritual cannibalism at his temple on occasion, according toMichael E. Smith, an emeritus archaeologist at Arizona State University.
One key myth featuring Mictlantecuhtli, according to University of California, Riverside archaeologist emeritus Karl Taube, involves the creation of the generation of people living in the world today. In this origin myth, the feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of earth, water and wind, among other things, must go to the underworld to retrieve the bones of all the deceased ancestors who had been turned into fish by a massive flood. Mictlantecuhtli agrees to give up the bones if Quetzalcoatl can blow a conch shell trumpet while journeying around the underworld.
The brilliant blue, polished turquoise stones pressed into the resin-coated exterior of this yucca-fiber woven basketry armband make this object as striking as it is unusual. The mosaic armband was in the front of a cave in far west Texas in 1926 or 1927. Also found in the cave were hafted bifaces, sundry Pacific shell ornaments, obsidian cruciforms, a headdress fragment, and approximately 2000 or more discarded woven sandals, among other unusual objects. The cave is thought to have served as a shrine, repeatedly visited by Ancestral Puebloan people over hundreds of years. Today it is called Ceremonial Cave. Ceremonial Cave is located in the Hueco Mountains, east of El Paso (see Hueco Tanks for more information about the area). The location and context of the turquoise armband within the cave was not recorded—a great loss to our understanding of the artifact. Despite this lacuna, a common and tragic affliction of looted archeological sites in the Southwest, part of the story of the armband can be told.
Robert P. Anderson, the president of the El Paso Archaeological Society, and R. W. Stafford were the individuals responsible for bringing the attention of Ceremonial Cave to the wider public. The two found the cave on a 1926 hunting trip when seeking shelter from a storm. In the following months, they conducted “rampant unsystematic looting” of the site and alerted the local news to their find. This turquoise-encrusted band was one of many objects they removed from the site. In 1927, the Ceremonial Cave artifact collection amassed by Anderson and Stafford was purchased by passionate amateur archeologists Eileen and Burrow Alves of El Paso, who by purchasing the collection prevented it from being sold piecemeal. The Alves also enlisted Southwestern archeologists Cornelius Burton Cosgrove and Harriet Silliman Cosgrove to excavate a portion of the site. The collection remained with the Alves until after the death of Eileen in 1935, when it was moved to the Gila Pueblo in Arizona and subsequently transferred to the Arizona State Museum.
In 1990, the collection was transferred to the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) at the University of Texas at Austin. At the time this was written, the armband was on loan to the Bullock Museum in Austin for public exhibition. Other Ceremonial Cave objects collected during professional excavations undertaken at the site are scattered across a few other curation facilities in the US. Likely, some artifacts removed during the looting bonanza that befell Ceremonial Cave after its publicization by Anderson and Stafford remain in private collections.
Only two other similar basketry bands, sometimes termed bottomless or cylindrical baskets, have been documented at Ancestral Puebloan sites in the Southwest. One of these was excavated at Pueblo Bonito in northern New Mexico, 300 miles northwest of Ceremonial Cave, and the other was excavated at the Ridge Ruin site near Flagstaff, Arizona. These two bands share more similarities with each other than they do with the Ceremonial Cave band. Both the Pueblo Bonito and Ridge Ruin bands were found as grave offerings in association with two of the most elaborate burials known in the Southwest. The Pueblo Bonito specimen is 15 cm high and 7.5 cm diameter, covered in 1214 tightly fit, polished turquoise stones pressed into pitch or resin. When found, it was filled with over 5600 loose turquoise and shell beads and pendants.
comtinued… https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/gallery/entry-001/
Sun God, K'inich Ajaw???