Pottery Style and Society in Ancient Peru

The American Society for Ethnohistory 1979 / That art forms a system of communication, having meaning for both the people who make it and for those who use it, is one of the basic tenets of the anthropological approach to its study. Dorothy Menzel's concern in this major scholarly contribution is with the method of analysis of art as a system of communication and the precise elucidation of its potential for allowing insight and understanding into the culture of which it is a part. Investigation focuses on the analysis of formal and contextual modifications within the late Pre-Hispanic and early Post-Hispanic ceramic art of one South Coast Peruvian valley, the Ica Valley, and these modifications are interpreted as reflections of specific social and political change in Ica society. The author, the foremost authority on the archaeology of the Peruvian South Coast, takes into consideration five stylistic episodes within the Late lea art tradition. Her work is based on an analysis of pottery and other materials excavated in 1900-1901 by Max Uhle, and which now form part of the Uhle collection at the Robert H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley. Menzel indicates that this is a " reanalysis of the same materials on which all earlier interpretations of Late Ica pottery have been based, but the methodology involved and the conclusions reached are fundamentally different and provide the framework for a significantly new cultural interpretation.