5.4 Theories and Interpretations of Indigenous American Art

Sources can disagree, especially for Native North America, where Native and non-Native accounts sometimes tell different stories.

• Archaeology: excavation of sites and offerings, though many objects in museums were dug up without records.
• Written accounts: Spanish chronicles describe the Inka and Mexica, and can be applied, carefully, to earlier cultures.
• Writing: Maya hieroglyphs and Mexica picture-writing name who is shown and when, as at Yaxchilán.
• Living traditions and oral history: present-day practices can shed light on the past (scholars call this ethnographic analogy).
• Other sciences: astronomy, botany and radiocarbon dating help explain how sites were placed and when they were built.

Chavín de Huántar (northern highlands, Peru; Chavín; 900–200 BCE; stone (architectural complex); granite (Lanzón and sculpture); hammered gold alloy (jewelry)). The site sits about 3,150 m up, where two rivers meet on a route between the Pacific coast and the Amazon lowlands. Its U-shaped temple faces a sunken circular plaza. Inside are narrow, lightless stone corridors called galleries, with air shafts and water channels running beneath.

At the crossing of the oldest galleries stands the Lanzón, a granite stela (carved upright stone) about 4.5 m tall. It shows a being with a fanged, snarling mouth, claws and snake-like hair, one hand raised and one lowered. Its shape resembles a lance or a digging stick. Only a few people could have seen it at once, by torchlight, in a cramped space.

Other sculpture includes carved heads that change from human to animal, reliefs of jaguars and of part-human, part-feline beings, including one holding what looks like a San Pedro cactus (a plant with hallucinogenic effects), and hammered gold jewelry such as a nose ornament, worn to frame the face.

Putting this evidence together, many archaeologists interpret Chavín as a pilgrimage center with an oracle (a sacred source of prophecy or advice). Pilgrims led through dark, disorienting galleries, hearing water roaring through channels and conch-shell trumpets (decorated ones were found in a gallery in 2001), would have been primed for an awe-inspiring encounter with the Lanzón. The human-to-animal carvings suggest shamanic transformation, perhaps aided by the cactus. Exotic goods from the coast and the Amazon, and the spread of the Chavín style across Peru, support the idea that people came from far away. Keep these as interpretations: Chavín left no writing.

Great Serpent Mound (Adams County, southern Ohio; Mississippian (Eastern Woodlands); c. 1070 CE; earthwork/effigy mound). An effigy mound is earth piled into the shape of an animal. This one is a serpent about 411 m (1,348 ft) long along its curves and about 1 m high, winding along a ridge above Brush Creek. Its head, near the cliff edge, holds an oval shape that has been read as an eye, an egg or the sun, and it points roughly toward the summer solstice sunset. Unlike many nearby mounds, the serpent contains no burials.

Its date is debated. Radiocarbon dates published in the 1990s pointed to about 1070 CE, linking it to the Fort Ancient culture, which the CED groups under Mississippian. A 2014 study argued it was first built much earlier, around 300 BCE, by the Adena culture, perhaps repaired later. Some have connected the 1070 date to Halley's Comet of 1066, but that is speculation. Frederic Ward Putnam excavated and restored the mound in the 1880s, so what you see is partly reconstructed. On the exam, use the CED's date and culture.