UCLA

The Middle Cauca region in the northwest Andes has traditionally been portrayed as a provincial, stagnant, and culturally passive area. Its minimally adorned ceramic sculpture has been overlooked in favor of elaborate golden figurines and relegated as unsolvable and mysterious, since the vast majority of these objects come from looted contexts. However, in this thesis, I will challenge these assumptions.

First I present evidence that this “Intermediate Area” was in fact a vibrant center of artistic production and cultural exchange. In light of this, we cannot consider the cultures and the objects that they produced as belonging to provincial societies that simply absorbed ideas from a larger center. Second, by using early sixteenth-century chronicles, archaeological reports, ethnographies, and a close visual and material analysis of surviving objects, I demonstrate that much can be gleaned from Middle Cauca retablo sculptures, specifically their artistic significance and the rich history of the cultures that produced them. I show how these sculptural forms, which date from A.D. 1000 to 1400, reveal evidence of vast trade networks stretching across the northern Andes. In addition, this evidence highlights the Middle Cauca’s innovative engagement with concepts of gender, the body, and the afterlife. As we shall see, Middle Cauca artists sculpted the body to situate it within a larger cosmological structure and provide the deceased with enduring stability and guidance.