Mummy false heads from Pachacamac and the ontology of the dead in ancient Peru

ABSTRACT

False heads have been a recurring accessory for Andean mummies since the Middle Horizon (ca AD750-1000). Made of ceramic, wood, or cloth, they show schematic human features and are placed on the funerary bundles that contain the bodies of the deceased. From a corpus of nearly 80 pieces from the Pachacamac site (excavations and museum collections), a typology is proposed, accompanied by a chronology based on a series of absolute dates. False heads also have recurring characteristics that allow us to understand their particular function. It appears that these objects are associated with certain important ancestors, whom their descendants worshiped. They were active agents, participants in the ritual traditions discussed ethnohistorically. The false head plays a crucial role in the relationship between the dead and the living and sheds light on the specific ontological position of the dead in the ancient Andes.

KEYWORDS:

• Ancestor cult
• artefact agency
• funerary patterns
• mummies
• Ychsma
• Andean archaeology

Acknowledgments

My warmest thanks to Nathalie Bloch (CReA-Patrimoine, ULB) for processing of the figures, and to Lawrence Owens and Tatiana Vlémincq-Mendieta for kindly sharing unedited false heads images as well as to my colleagues Pierre Petit, Maxime de Formanoir and Luc Delvaux for providing me references on Africa and ancient Egypt. I wish to express my greatest gratitude to my dear friend Lisa DeYoung Triemstra for language review, to Manuela Fisher at the Berlin Museum for providing false head photo and kind permission to reproduce it, and to the editors Chantal Conneller and Benjamin Elliott, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their remarks and suggestions on a previous version of the manuscript; remaining errors are, of course, my own.

Disclosure statement

The Author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

1. Real versions of those so-called mouth masks, in gold, are attributed to the Paracas (de Lavalle and Lang 1990) and Nasca cultures (de Lavalle 1989), but without documented archaeological provenience.

2. Very often however, in general public literature, sales catalogues, museum collections and others, reference is made to these objects as ‘mummy masks’, which by the way is revealing of the assimilation that many do intuitively, between the false heads and the masks.

3. Unfortunately the funerary chamber where it was discovered had been looted in the past, so even if provenience is safe, it proved impossible to relate this false head to a specific bundle, most of them having been dismantled by treasure seekers.

4. For use of cinnabar amongst other Andean groups, including in funerary rituals, see (Burger, Lane, and Cooke 2016; Cesareo et al. 2020; Truhan, Burton, and Olsen Bruhns 2005).

5. It is hypothesized that such distinctions were made on other criteria such as different accessories (headbands, feathers, jewels, etc.) as well as the overall funerary context (Owens and Eeckhout 2015).

6. As non-elite burials bundles are found in simple pits, with no removable opening system such as a reed roof and the like, but rather mere filling with no evidence of post-burial intrusion, we have to admit the lower class dead were buried once and for all, and forever. There is no evidence around for any kind of cult practice.

7. The predominance of wood (like the wooden icon of Pachacamac) perhaps signified that ancestors were equated with saplings or malquis, the Quechua term employed at the time of the conquest to describe mummies and their generative and fertilizing power (de Arriaga [1621] 1999).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS; Fondation ULB; Université libre de Bruxelles.

Notes on contributors

Peter Eeckhout

Peter Eeckhout is Full Professor of Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His research interests include complex societies of the Americas, monumental architecture, and funerary archaeology. He has been leading excavations in Peru since 1993 and is the director of the Ychsma Project at the site of Pachacamac. He is author, editor, or coeditor of several books and of more than eighty book chapters and scholarly papers in international journals.