Mouth Masks and Severed Heads

One of ATA’s Andean Textile Talks last year explored a fragmentary Nazca cloth from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Even though this textile is one of the greatest painted textiles to survive from Andean antiquity, what intrigued me the most about museum curator Dr. Susan Bergh’s presentation was the vivid title—Mouth Masks and Severed Heads. I expected the painting to be bloody and gross, but Dr. Bergh’s informative talk made it absolutely fascinating—from an artistic as well as a historical perspective. 

This textile has been carbon dated between 150 BCE and 50 CE. This was a time when the Paracas culture was transforming into the Nazca. The piece shows six figures parading across the cloth—probably documenting a ceremony or procession. It may have been a non-funerary offering from Cahuachi, in Peru, which was an important ceremonial center for the Nazca culture at that time. Other, more familiar, ceremonial sites are the Nazca Lines, or geoglyphs, which lie adjacent to Cahuachi. Dr. Bergh presented considerable information about the significance of the Nazca Lines and the pottery innovations of this same period, but I’m focusing on the textile and its painting.

The figures are painted on mostly cotton, plain woven fabric.  Some parts are missing but you can see most of the figures. The textile is 9 feet wide and 2 feet high and was woven on a backstrap loom, probably made to be a man’s mantle worn draped around the shoulders.  Dr. Bergh’s analysis of the painting was fascinating. The paints on this particular textile haven’t been studied but indigo, a vegetal red, and carbon black were used on other Nazca cloths of the period. Nazca pottery and this textile both show a wide variety of colors. The textile has at least a dozen. Most of the figures on the textile show different versions of the central icons of the Cahuachi religion, each presented slightly differently. Since I’m just writing a blog and not a book, I picked some of my favorites to describe here.

The figures in the painting are a mixture of feline and human; Dr Bergh compared one to a river otter and described another as simian. Some of these figures show animals that came from the Amazon—far from the Paracas area. The detail that the painter used is remarkable.  The masked figure below on the left has a forehead mask, possibly a mouth mask with whiskers and has the severed heads mentioned in the presentation’s title. One head is attached to his tail and another is in his hand. He has a tail like a feline and clawed feet but seems to have a human hand grasping the severed head. 

The final figure is the most intact and is known as the “Trophy Head Taster.”   This same figure is found in many pottery pieces from the period.  I think he’d qualify for the “bloody and gross” that I envisioned in the beginning. 

I became so intrigued by these figures that when I found a used copy of Early Nasca Needlework by Alan R. Sawyer (ISBN-10:‎ 1856690881; ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1856690881), I snapped it up and I fell further down this rabbit hole of ancient figures. The embroidered figures in the book are beautifully bright and colorful. Some of them are made using the cross-knit looping (anillado) technique, which some weavers from the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco (CTTC) are exploring. Interesting connections—past and present. I foresee another blog in my future.

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