Partial and complete deposits and depictions: Social zooarchaeology, iconography and the role of animals in Late Moche Peru

Abstract

The advent of social zooarchaeology has stimulated a more in-depth conversation on the role of animals in society. Zooarchaeological methods provide the means to assess not just the subsistence strategies of past communities but the larger social, economic and political systems within which animals are situated. By addressing faunal assemblages within different contexts and in terms of the values and practices that may have structured these human-animal interactions, archaeologists can better interpret the representation of animals in different material media and by extension the social and ideological role certain species played in past cultures. This paper mobilizes faunal evidence from the Late Moche site of Huaca Colorada (AD650–850) in the Jequetepeque Valley of Peru and contextualizes these patterns in the Moche iconographic corpus. The iconographic record indicates that the Moche made a distinction between wild and domestic animals; wild species appear to have been understood as partible beings associated with supernaturals, while domesticated animals were socialized and viewed as integral to human affairs. The taxonomic differentiation of wild and domestic species is apparent in both animal use and representation and in different contexts of ceremonial practice. Moreover, domestic animals were interred as special offerings, comparable to human sacrifices, while wild species were deposited only as partial and distributed offerings.