Techno-aesthetic ceramic traditions and the effective communication of power on the North Coast of Peru

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I examine the relationship between technological and aesthetic shifts in Andean North Coast prestige ceramics and sociopolitical change by focusing on pottery as a form of information technology in a world without formal writing. To do so, I begin by defining two techno-aesthetic macro-traditions to emphasize the interconnections among technique and visual appearance, semantics and aesthetics. I then demonstrate how these two traditions waxed and waned in complementary fashion for millennia, and I set the shifts in their popularity within their broader sociopolitical contexts. In investigating technological choices and their concomitant visual qualities, I explore the interplay between technological, aesthetic, and sociopolitical transformations, with a focus on the changing role of ceramics as media for communicating ideological narratives of power and authority.

KEYWORDS:

• Prestige ceramics
• technology
• Andean North Coast
• aesthetics
• visual culture

Acknowledgments

Julia Guernsey and Joanne Pillsbury have long helped me refine my thinking about material culture and they both provided invaluable feedback on a draft of this essay. Two anonymous reviewers also provided helpful critique. Given limitations on space, I was not able to address all of the thought-provoking issues they raised.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. By technological style, I mean a persistent, patterned way(s) in which potters formed, finished, and fired their wares; by aesthetic style I mean the consistent sensory characteristics of the potters’ finished products, including tactility and visual appearance.

2. George Lau’s recent work on Recuay material culture from the northern highlands of Peru (Lau 2010, 2011) similarly investigates how technological choices produced a particular aesthetic across several media, one he associates with elite social structures. Lau notes that such technical systems can be highly localized and serve to distinguish groups from their neighbors as well as communicate ideas about internal beliefs and structures. Compared with the North Coast techno-aesthetic macro-traditions I discuss in this essay, the Recuay style was more geographically restricted and relatively short-lived.

3. Domestic wares comprise a third tradition, clearly distinct from finewares and prestige pottery. Utilitarian and elite/ceremonial wares were consistently made in different workshops and potters used different techniques in their manufacture.

4. Izumi Shimada and his colleagues have sought to rename the Lambayeque polities ‘Sicán,’ and the name has ‘stuck’ for this era when the culture reached its apogee.

5. Reduction firing requires less fuel than does oxidation and evidence indicates that that fuel resources changed from wood and other plant materials to dung. Also, changing demands on labor might have made the use of dung more labor efficient when compared to gathering fuelwood (c.f. Goldstein 2007, 323; Sillar 2000). Some experimental work indicates that dung produces a smokier environment conducive to smudging (Palamarczuk 2004).

Additional information

Funding

Parts of this research were funded by grants from the Provost and Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences at California State University, Northridge.

Notes on contributors

Cathy Lynne Costin

Cathy Lynne Costin is an anthropological archaeologist whose research has centered on the issue of how power is consolidated, maintained, and deployed in complex societies. In her early focus on the role of craft production in complex societies, with a particular emphasis on ceramic and textile production in the Precolumbian Andes, she explored the roles of materials, processes, knowledge and above all people to elucidate the domestic and political economies of premodern states. This work led to an interest in how material culture figured in elite strategies and how various factions deployed and manipulated symbols of identity and authority as they jockeyed for influence and power. In her current research, she aims to demonstrate how ritual specialists controlled and deployed sacred imagery and ritual knowledge during the time in which social complexity first developed in the Andean region.