Cupisnique

The Cupisnique and the Chavin

The relationship between Chavin and Cupisnique is not well understood, and the names are sometimes used interchangeably. For instance, the scholar Alana Cordy-Collins treats as Cupisnique a culture lasting from 1000 – 200 BC, which are the dates some associate with the Chavin culture. Izumi Shimada calls Cupisnique a possible ancestor of Mochica (Moche) culture with no mention of Chavin. Anna C. Roosevelt refers to "the coastal manifestation of the Chavin Horizon ...dominated by the Cupisnique style".

'Spider god' temple discovered

A Cupisnique adobe temple was discovered in 2008 in the Lambayeque valley in the area of the archaeological site of Ventarron. The newly discovered temple is very close to the Ventarron temple; this adjacent location is known as “Collud”.

This temple sheds some light on the connection between the Cupisnique and the Chavin because of shared iconography. In fact, some other related temples have also been discovered in the area recently.

The Chavin people who came after the Cupisnique built a temple adjacent to Collud about three hundred years later; this location is named "Zarpan".

All three temples are close together, and form a single archaeological site. There are also many shared elements between all three locations. For example, one common element is that of the Spider Creator god with his net. This motif appears to persevere from the 4,000-year-old temple of Ventarrón all the way to the Moche culture.

The temple found in 2008 also includes imagery of the "spider god", thought to be associated with rainfall, hunting and warfare. The spider god image combines a spider's neck and head, with the mouth of a large cat and the beak of a bird. The only decapitator creature that by nature decapitates its victims heads is the spider.

According to the team leader Walter Alva,

"Cupisnique and Chavin shared the same gods and the same architectural and artistic forms, showing intense religious interaction among the cultures of the Early Formative Period from the north coast to the Andes and down to the central Andes."

The Cupisnique and the Moche

The reason the Moche and the Cupisnique are sometimes referred to interchangeably is due to their similarities in ceramic designs. The Moche were the most “vibrant” in incorporating the cupisnique society of the emerging cultures that had a base population of farming and fishing along with a middle and elite class.

The main connection between the Cupisnique and the Moche is the incorporation of the decapitation theme where there exists a decapitator and a decapitated character. In the Cupisnique society, “the decapitators appear in five supernatural guises: human, monster, bird, fish, and spider…” Moche decapitators are the same five plus two additional characters: the crab and the scorpion. Below are images of the main five decpitators from both the Cupisnique and the Moche culture.

Scholars believe that the parallelism between Moche and Cupisnique iconography is not just coincidental; rather the Moche were “the heirs to a belief that they subscribed to in practice”.

The Cupisnique people are sometimes spoken of as a cult due to two main reasons. The first reason being that there had been very “little direct evidence of their patterns of social organization, demography, or subsistence strategies”. The second reason being the buildings [are] embellished with painted, incised stucco relief work depicting surreal creatures”.

The Cupisnique seem to be deeply rooted by religion, which seemed to have influenced greatly into emerging character cultures such as the Salinar, Vicus, Gallinazo, and as mentioned the Moche culture.

Other Cupisnique sites

One of the most important Cupisnique sites was Caballo Muerto in the Moche Valley.

Archaeologists recently excavated the Cupisnique site of Limoncarro in the Guadalupe District, Pacasmayo, La Libertad Region of northern Peru coast. Two phases of construction were identified; among other things, animal faces indicating Cupisnique iconography were uncovered.

Kuntur Wasi is another site that was influenced by the Cupisnique culture.

Cupisnique mirrors

Archaeological mirrors from Cupisnique sites have been identified, dating to 900-200 BC. They provide high quality images.