Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru

Chapter 7: Huari D-Shaped Structures, Sacrificial Offerings, and Divine Rulership

  Huari D-Shaped Structures, Sacrificial Offerings, and Divine Rulership  .  Department of Anthropology,The Catholic Universityof America, Washington, D.C. ‘‘They didn’t do it out of cruelty, but because they were very devout,’’ he explained, ‘‘It was their way of showing respect for the spirits of the mountains, of the earth, whom they were going to disturb. They did it to avoid reprisals and to assure their own survival. So there would be no landslides, no huaycos, so that lightning wouldn’t strike them dead and their ponds wouldn’t flood. You have to understand their thinking. For them, there were no natural catastrophes. Everything was decided by a higher power that had to be won over with sacrifices.’’   , Death in the Andes  The Huari Empire coalesced in the Ayacucho Valley of Peru (Map) during the Middle Horizon (..  to ). Its development ushered in new architectural forms, urban living on a scale unknown prior to this time in the central highlands, and new ritual practices such as the breaking of large and beautifully painted urns and jars as buried offerings. These vessels display the main images of Huari iconography that include an array of humans and Profile and Front View Staffed Figures (Menzel,; Cook; W. H. Isbell and Cook). Representational images in Huari art provide new insights into pre-Columbian lifeways, religion, ritual activity, human attire, social groupings, and even individual identities, but much lies ahead. Huari iconography (found on ceramics, textiles, stone monoliths, architecture , semiprecious metal objects, carved and inlaid shell, and semiprecious stone, etc.) was the principal medium for conveying considerable amounts of visual information. However, with few exceptions, Andean modes of representation have been difficult to interpret, because the iconography has not been amenable to comparisons with archaeological remains .The interpretation of ancient Andean imagery and its relationship to material evidence of behavior has been practiced with considerable success only with the north-coast Moche culture of Peru (e.g., Alva and Donnan ; Benson; Castillo; Donnan; Hocquenghem; Quil-  Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru ter ). The problem is exacerbated by the fact that there was no known form of writing in the Andes prior to the Spanish contact. In this study, the importance of a building type known only at Huari sites is emphasized, as are the activities that apparently took place within its walls, which include: special tombs, offerings, and human sacrifice. A motif on Huari offering pottery is identified as this building, and figures painted on the same vessels suggest that the structures included the practice of human sacrifice. These relationships highlight aspects of ancient politics and rituals that took place within a quintessentially Huari building that is replicated across the highlands as the empire expanded. Pre-Columbian evidence of ancient politics and religion in the Andes has been most successfully studied through architecture, mausoleums, and associated sumptuary goods from elite contexts. In this study, the iconography made it possible to identify the sacrificial contexts of D-shaped structures.     Huari imagery contains clues to interpreting recently discovered archaeological remains at the capital of Huari and its provincial centers. Many of the issues raised in this chapter and in other contemporary debates that concern politics and ritual were discussed early in the twentieth century, particularly in the works of A. M. Hocart ( []) and in similar presentations by James Frazer ( []), who serve as interesting examples that these ideas are not all new. Hocart, for example, observed that small-scale societies have their own ‘‘king’’ or ‘‘ruler,’’ who emerges when needed; a person prepared to assume the responsibility of regulating the lives of people or to be a supreme arbiter of justice. For Hocart, it is as if ‘‘nature had prepared the organization before it was needed, had anticipated the growth of the state’’ (Hocart : –). What was this organization about before it became government ? For Hocart, it is an organization for ritual (Needham’s introduction in Hocart : xxvii). [It] is vastly older than government, for it exists where there is no government and where none is needed. When however societies increase so much in complexity that a coordinating agency . . . is required, that ritual organization will gradually take over this task. (Hocart : ) Hocart saw a ritual basis to state and imperial governments. He declared that ‘‘the first kings must have been dead kings’’ (Hocart , cited in Hocart: xxiii, in Needham’s introduction). His ideas were soon super- [3.145.47.253] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 07...