Chavín

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Chavín

Chavín, the first of the widespread, great art styles of the Andes. Chavín is named for the archaeological site of Chavín De Huántar in the northern Peruvian highlands, a temple complex that exhibits the greatest formal expression of this style. Its widespread distribution corresponds generally to the Early Horizon of the Andean chronological sequence (c. 1400–400 bce).

Around 1400 bce a religious movement began to spread across northern Peru that archaeologists term the cult of Chavín. It incorporated elements from older prehistoric Andean coastal religions represented by temples with sunken circular courts and later U-shaped temples, and combined them with elements from the tropical forests of the Amazon basin. Many of the images most commonly represented in Chavín art are wild animals found in the tropical jungle of the Amazonian lowlands. Prominent are the cayman, the jaguar, the serpent, and raptorial birds such as hawks or harpy eagles. Features of these animals, especially fangs and claws, are used even on nonanimal and human representations in Chavín art, probably as a sign of divinity. These features occur in a great variety of contexts even on a single image. Hair is represented as snakes, limbs end in feet with large raptorial bird claws or jaguar claws, junctions of the limbs with the trunk of the body are often shown as snarling, fanged feline or cayman mouths, as is the waist, or even the knees. Feathers may end in eyes, snakes' heads, or feline mouths. It has been suggested that the constant use of these features represents a system of visual metaphors. These are thought to be analogous to kenning, or comparison by substitution. The audience for Chavín art would have understood the references, so that, for example, as a result of an artist's consistently substituting snakes for hair in an image, snakes would eventually come to symbolize hair or represent the qualities of hair. It would also be possible to make kennings of well-known kennings and thus add more complexity to the images.

Chavín art conformed to a specific set of canons. In addition to the use of kennings, the principles of Chavín art include bilateral symmetry, reversible images, and double-profile heads. Bilateral symmetry was extensively used but was rarely perfect, for compositions often have at least one unsymmetrical element, typically a face looking to one side in the center. Many Chavín compositions also contain reversible imagery, whereby a work rotated side to side and/or inverted will still present a right-side-up image. This is usually achieved by clever and careful use of mouth and eye images in kennings on the major intersections of body parts, typically at the junction of the legs, arms, and head with the trunk of the figure. Double-profile heads are achieved through careful placement of two profile heads. Facing each other, the elements of the two heads can be visually combined and read as a single face.

By 1300–1200 bce temples and artworks associated with this cult had been built in the north highlands of Peru and on the Peruvian north coast. In the highlands, the temples were built of stone and decorated with low-relief carvings of Chavín deities and icons. The coastal temples were built of adobe and embellished with sculpted mud friezes that were painted in bright colors. By 1000 bce Chavín influence had appeared as far south as the area near the modern city of Lima. The cult continued to expand, and by 500 bce, Chavín influence extended from the modern cities of Cajamarca in the north to Ayacucho in the south. Enduring for centuries, the Chavín cult was enormously successful, but by about 400 bce it seems to have disappeared, as a number of new regional traditions asserted themselves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

An excellent synthesis of archaeological research on Chavín can be found in Richard L. Burger, "Unity and Heterogeneity within the Chavín Horizon," in Peruvian Prehistory, edited by Richard W. Keatinge (1988), pp. 99-144. See also Richard L. Burger, The Prehistoric Occupation of Chavín de Huantar, Peru (1984). For a discussion of kenning in Chavín art, see John H. Rowe, "Form and Meaning in Chavín Art," in Peruvian Archaeology: Selected Readings, edited by John H. Rowe and Dorothy Menzel (1967), pp. 72-103. See also Peter G. Roe, A Further Exploration of the Rowe Chavín Seriation and Its Implication for North Central Coast Chronology (1974); and Richard L. Burger, Chavín and the Origins of Andean Civilization (1992).