La Señora de Cao
In another hemisphere, a thousand years before their own fatal, violent conflicts with Christianity, the arts and crafts of Andean women survive in fabulous variety to tell of their technical skills, beliefs and relations with the cosmos.
A hundred years or so before the first settlement at West Stow, the mummified body of a nameless but very special Mochica woman, who has been dubbed La Señora de Cao, was interred at a ceremonial complex called Huaca Cao Viejo northwest of Trujillo in the Libertad region of northwest coastal Peru. Her sensational discovery by archaeologists in 2005 has been followed by intensive analysis of her body and grave and of the place where she was interred.The world view of ancient Andean culture was rich in animistic symbolism and ritual, dominated by a cyclic model of time and by special places in the landscape invested with otherworldly significance, points of contact with forces beyond the human realm. Societies that wrote gigantic pictorial messages to the skies (the Nazca lines in southern Peru are contemporary with Moche culture) to ensure favourable interventions in weather, fertility and war required intermediaries: both male and female shamans, often of exalted social status, are widely depicted in Andean art.
Huaca Cao Viejo seems to have been a centre for ritual: its pyramid complex overlooked the boundless Pacific Ocean and was adorned with painted murals, preserved in its dry sands, which show a procession of life-sized naked prisoners, bulging-eyed shamanic figures holding decapitated heads, marvellous spiders and beasts of the imagination.
The woman known as La Señora de Cao was buried in a tomb lined and capped with stuccoed adobe bricks, on top of which an owl-faced ceramic vessel had been laid. Archaeologists removed the tomb’s capping to reveal a cane mat, then a raft of logs.
Beneath that lay an enormous multi-layered textile mummy bundle∫ surrounded by a number of ceramic vessels – one of them a stirrup cup depicting the figure of a female healer wearing a cowl ministering to a mother and sick child – and the body of a second female, who had been strangled. Whether the irony was deliberate or casual is impossible to say: to our modern sensibilities, the thought of human sacrifice and ideas of healing and caring are absolutely incompatible. In a world of cosmic cycles, the giving and taking of life were perhaps merely spokes of the same wheel.In very dry burial conditions, soft tissue and skin are desiccated; hair and nails survive (on male corpses you sometimes see a day’s post-mortem growth of stubble). La Señora’s hair had been plaited and braided. Tattoos on her arms in a rare blue ink were still visible: zigzag snakes and spiders, which, in the visual lexicon of Moche culture, indicate divination skills and, perhaps, the taking of blood. She was in her twenties, just under 1.5 metres (5 ft) tall, and seems to have borne at least one child. With her, inside the inner wrappings, lay metal bowls, a necklace of gold face-beads, nose rings and a bundle of dart throwers wrapped in the cotton cloth that formed her shroud: trappings of wealth, prestige and power.
La Señora’s shroud was covered in overlapping metal sheets. Above these lay a cotton blanket, then gowns; then a counterpane of gold plaques, sewn onto a cotton sheet and flanked by two metal war clubs. Above her head lay several gold crowns and other headpieces. In all, she had been encased within twenty layers of materials. The magnificence of the fittings must, one supposes, have been matched by the grandeur of the ceremony with which she was laid to rest. If she was not a supreme ruler she must, it seems, have been a priestess of very exalted dignity and ceremonial status – perhaps a great healer and shaman.
Among other surviving Andean art from the period are depictions of women in magnificent costumes leading processions of attendants and victims in ceremonies involving blood offerings. Female sexuality, healing and midwifery skills were openly displayed in brilliant varieties of materials and designs.Ω Details of backstrap looms drawn on ceramics, and the preservation of superb examples of weaving with very high thread counts, dazzling patterns and rich dyes, give us a sense of women’s place at the heart of South American culture and at the apex of technical brilliance. The backstrap loom is still very much a part of the domestic equipment of Andean women, a living connection to the ancestors and both a social and communal means of expressing solidarity with their maternal lineage and their broader cultural inheritance.