BIBLIOGRAPHY

FUNG PINEDA, ROSA, and CARLOS WILLIAMS

1979 Exploraciones y excavaciones en el Valle de Seehfn, Casma. Revista del Museo Nacional A i: Ill-ISS. Lima.

LUMBRERAS, LUIS G.

I974 Informe de laborcs del Proyecto Chavfn. Arqueolooicas IS: 37-55.

Lima.

PATTERSON, THOMAS

1968 Current Research. American Antiquity 33: 422-424.

Jaws: the Control of Power in the Early Nuclear American Ceremonial Center

DONALD W. LATHRAP

RAVINES, ROGGER, and WILLIAM H. ISBELL

1975 Garagay: sitio ceremonial temprano en el Valle de Lima. Revista del Museo Nacional 41: 253-275. Lima.

TELLO, JULIO C.

1956 ArqueologfQ del Valle de Casma, culturas: Chauin, Santa 0 Huaylas YunJta y sub-Chimu, Publicacion Antropo16gica del Archivo "Julio C. Tello" de la Universidad Mayor de San Marcos I. Lima.

1960 Chavin: cultura matriz de la civili zacion andina. Primera parte.

Publica cion Antropologica del Archivo "Julio C. Tello" de 1a Universidad Mayor de San Marcos 2. Lima.

DONALD E.

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA

Post Classic Innovations in Architecture and Settlement Patterns in the Casma Valley, Peru. Southwestern Journal oj AnthropoloJty 20: 91- 105·

WILLIAMS LE6N, CARLOS

I979 Arquitectura y urbanismo en el antiguo Peru. Historia del Peru 8: 389- 585. Ed. Mejia Baca, Lima.

I980 Complejos de piramides con planta en U, patron arquitectonico de la costa central. Revista del Museo Nacional 44: 95-1 ro. Lima.

THIS ESSAY IS AN ARBITRARY SEGMENT of a persistent and evolving train of thought which has been haunting me for a long time. It was in ,1967, I believe, when I first noticed that the Smiling God in the often-illustrated panel from Chavin de Huantar (Fig. I) was not simply standing there grinning, but was doing something important. In fact, he was balancing the male principle of order and culture, represented by the conch, held in his right hand, against the female principle of chaos and regeneration, represented by the spondylus, held in his left hand. He was maintaining the balance of the cosmos with precisely the same ritual as that performed by modern Kogi priests at burials. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff's description of this performance (1950, 1951, 1974) applies equally to the Kogi priest and to the god in the Chavin panel. Since the moment of that insight, Chavin art has become progressively more communicative to me. Unfortunately this communication has focused on caymans to a degree bordering on monomania.

My previous published and unpublished papers (Lathrap 1971, I973, 1974, 1977, 1982, inter alia) on these issues represent equally arbitrary segments of this continuously evolving perspective. Even this presentation has a complex evolutionary history of its own. I In the course of these ruminations, there has been a subtle but progressive shift in my point of view. Perhaps saying that there has been an expansion of my point of view

'This particular articulation of ideas was first given orally in a seminar on cosmology and symbolism at the University of Illinois in the spring of 1978. In the spring of 1981, expanded oral versions were given first at the meeting of the Midwestern Mesoamerican conference at Purdue and then at Austin, Texas, as part of the memorial for the late Clifford Evans. In the spring of I982, a two-hour version was given to a seminar on the Chavin and Olmec organized by Richard Burger and Michael COl.' at Yale. This paper represents condensation and hopefully a focusing of the Yale presentation. I am grateful to Donald Collier, Robert Feldman, and Ronald Weber for editing this present version for publication, and to John Rowe for providing Figures I and 2.

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Fig. I Smiling God from Chavin de Huantar. (Drawing based on a rubbing by John H. Rowe, after Rowe 1967: fig. 2J).

would be more accurate, since the older issues have never lost their fascination, but further considerations continue to intrude.

At the beginning, the identification of the species of plants and animals in Chavin art and the demonstration that Chavin art and Olmec art could only have evolved from the same historically unique cosmological model seemed the most crucial issues (Lath rap 1973). But once it became clear that the Obelisk Tello (Fig. 2) could be understood only as a complete and detailed cosmological model, other problems of broader significance emerged as both intriguing and potentially solvable. As Reichel-Dolmatoff (1971) has demonstrated, the cosmological models of the aborigine tend to be more congruent with the complexity and circularity of real ecological systems than with the highly simple models that modern western folk-tradition derives from analogy with simple mechanics. Further, and perhaps most crucial if we are to understand the past and indeed the present, we must recognize that cosmologies and the ceremonial centers that they generate have an absolutely essential role in dissipating the disruptive tensions that human society generates. A loss of faith in the ceremonial life of the community is as fatal to the polity as a loss of sufficient calories to feed its people.

BAR MAGNETS AND COSMIC PIVOTS

A crucial point of departure in discussing ceremonial architecture is to understand how the structure functions not simply as a locale for particular ceremonies, but as a force in its own right that shapes supernatural

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Fig. 2 From Chavin de Huantar, roll-out of reliefs on the Obelisk Tello. (Drawing based on a rubbing by John H. Rowe, after Rowe 1967: fig. 6).

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power. I insist on the global applicability. of Paul Wheatley's general theory concerning the way in which ceremonial architecture deforms and focuses the flux of supernatural force. If I have any disagreement with Wheatley, it is that he concludes The Pivot oj the Four Quarters (Wheatley 1971) with a discussion of the specifics of the theory as they relate to China and India rather than with a coda that stresses the adequacy and universality of the theory.

The essential model is generated by the fact that the native mind conceives the effect of the axis mundi-or a material representation of the axis mundi such as the Obelisk Tello (Fig. 2)-on the flux of supernatural power as being identical to the way in which a bar magnet deforms the electromagnetic field. I assume that the reader has at some time in his schooling seen the experiment in which a bar magnet is placed under a sheet of paper and iron filings are sprinkled on the paper. When the iron filings are caught in the magnetic field, they arrange themselves into what appear to be discrete lines or "ropes" of power. We will return to such "ropes of power" toward the end of this essay.

The experiment presents a two-dimensional cross section through the magnetic deformation, which has the three-dimensional shape of a doughnut. The perceived efficacy of the early Peruvian ceremonial center lies in the ability of its wings, whether perceived as anns of the copulate U or jaws of the cayman, to compress the non-directional field of supernatural power into a sharply directional, two-dimensional stream or river of power. The validity of the bar-magnet analogy is implicit on almost every page of Wheatley's masterly discussion (1971), but it is totally explicit in two recent treatments of the cosmological concepts of modern highland Quechua, the PhD theses of John Earls (1973) and Catherine Wagner (1978).2

Closer to home are the writings of William Isbell on the iconography of the early Peruvian ceremonial center (Isbell 1977, n.d.). Although each of us has pursued the subject at length and in great detail, remarkably enough when comparing our interpretations, there is almost no repetition or redundancy. When faced with the weighty question, "Is the plan of the early Peruvian ceremonial center a metaphor for the structural members of an upper Amazon maloca, or is this plan a metaphor for the jaws of the Great Cayman?", I can come up only with a resounding "Yes!" The one point

'Since I wrote the above. I found the following highly gratifying statement in another of

Wheatley's publications (Wheatley 1977: 72):

Through its influence on the siting and orientation of city. village. hamlet, factory. temple, farm, house. barn. grave, and -as we shall see-s-bank, in short on all man-made elements in the landscape, the cumulative effect of this pseudo-science on the Chinese living space was comparable to that of a bar-magnet on iron filings.

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of essential and total agreement, which overrides the large number of differences in details of our interpretations, is that architectural designs-in the case discussed by Isbell, the structural poles of the Desana malocafocus supernatural power to a precise point that establishes an axis mundi, When the shaman's stool is positioned at precisely this point, a person with appropriate training and/or status can communicate directly to all levels of the universe along the axis mundi.

The ability of the structural poles of a maloca or the wings of the ceremonial center to turn the non-directional doughnut of force into a precisely directional stream and to aim this stream is, of course, highly relevant to the argument put forth by Carlos Williams (this volume). He demonstrates convincingly that the aim of the early Peruvian ceremonial center is to focus the way in which the stream of supernatural force controls the rainfall cycle and brings life-giving water to the appropriate places. The land within the arms of the U is metaphorically both the total territory of the polity supporting the ceremonial center and the individual chacra of each farmer of the polity. Thus what the ceremonial center embodies is the symbolic irrigation of all agricultural land within the polity. I am yet to be convinced that in every case this symbolic act of irrigation was reinforced by the actual irrigation of the sacred precinct. It seems to me that this question must be answered on a case-by-case basis by more excavations within these precincts, using the most advanced techniques, and directed exclusively toward the solution of this particular problem. Even so, in the case of Williams's argument the areas of belief far exceed the areas of skepticism.

Finally, it is important to consider the theoretical position developed by Richard N. Adams (1975, 1978). Specifically, Adams argues that the structure and cosmology of ceremonial constructions and the spatial relationship among ceremonial centers offer a schema or template for the actual exercise of power. More importantly, the flux of calories expended to build and maintain ceremonial centers is a significant and most necessary part of-as well as a partial counter-weight to-the flow of energy necessary to maintain the dissipative structures embodied in all polities.

THE CAYMAN, POLITY, AND ENERGY

With this understanding of the ability of ceremonial structures to concentrate and direct supernatural power, we can proceed to the main argument of this paper. Stated as baldly as possible, it is that: I) the cayman was theoverarching cosmological symbol in the culture of Nuclear America; 2) the jaws of the cayman became the most important icon ordering the organization of Nuclear American ceremonial architecture; and 3) the

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architectural order in turn fed back into the structuring of such domains as representative art, agronomy, political sciencerastronorny, and even writing. Although the further structuring of these domains is more explicit in the Mesoamerican data base, I believe that all of the insights derived from an examination of the Mesoamerican material, with the exception of those relating to writing, are equally important to our understanding of the Central Andean situation. One might say, however, that ifmy interpretation is largely correct, the explicitness of the Chavin icon closely approaches writing.

Perhaps the first question to be addressed is "Why is the cosmos a cayman?" I am assuming that all of the individual cosmological models of Nuclear America have as their prototype the black cayman, Melanosuihus niger, a species confined to the main trunk of the Amazon and the lower courses of its major tributaries. As the concept was spread beyond the actual range of Melancsuchus niger, there was, in some cases, a replacement by a species locally present. In the Upper Amazon, where the black cayman is in complementary distribution with the relatively puny caymans of the genus Caiman, the anaconda is the reigning, and potentially man-eating, aquatic carnivore. As a resuit, we have the cayman boat, so exuberantly depicted in the ceramic art of the Santarem culture, replaced by the anaconda boat, so completely described in the Desana materials of Reichel-Dolmatoff (1971). On the south coast of Peru there seems to be a replacement by the killer whale. Most of the Colombian representations of crocodilians arc clearly crocodiles, Crocodilus. Likewise, the clear depiction of both tooth rows in the crocodile deities of Cocle style and other related Panamanian styles indicates that indeed crocodiles, in a strict sense, were intended. In the early Mesoamerican depictions of deified crocodilians, the consistent indication of only the upper tooth row argues that it is the cayman that is intended, and the agnathic characteristic of Itzarnna in later Maya art appears to continue that intent.

Meianosuchus niger is the dominant aquatic predator wherever it occurs, thus balancing the significance of the jaguar as supreme predator of the land, and the harpy eagle as supreme predator of the sky. This fact alone might be considered as sufficient reason for its supreme position in Nuclear American cosmology. Given the clear depiction of the great cayman as Master of the Fishes, especially in the Yauya carving (Fig. 3), and given our interest in ceremonial centers as mechanisms for the maintenance of stability and health of the polity (a position so thoroughly documented by Wheatley), there is perhaps a deeper reason for selecting Melanosuchus niger as the ultimate symbol for environmental and social stability. To understand this reason we must consider the ecology of the rias, the huge

Fig. 3 Yauya Stela, Yauya. (Adapted from Rowe 1962: fig. 31 and from a drawing by Pablo Carrera M. distributed by the National Museum; after Roe 1974: fig. II).

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fresh-water reservoirs that form the lower course of many of the rivers entering the Amazon and its major white-water tributaries (Sternberg I975) .

During the height of the Pleistocene, the bed of the lower Amazon was scoured to a grade appropriate to the much lower sea level of the time, and the tributaries cut their valleys to a grade and depth appropriate to their entry into the mainstream. In the last 8, 000 to IO, 000 years the valley of the mainstream of the Amazon has rapidly filled with the immense load of sediments carried off the eastern slope of the Andes by the white-water rivers, building the land formations typical of the varzea, the present Amazon flood plain. In contrast, the smaller southern tributaries of the Amazon, which head entirely on the plain of the old alluvium (Lathrap I970), carry a meager load of sediment, while the large rivers, in particular the Tapajos and Xingu, which drain the extremely indurate east Brazilian shield, carry almost no sediment. Thus the lower valleys of all these tributary rivers have not been refilled and are flooded as the waters of the tributary rivers are impounded by the rising flood plain of the Amazon (Sioli I975). These dammed lakes or rias have the configuration of man-made reservoirs. It was on the beaches of these rias, in particular the lower Tapajos and Xingu, that populations of the black cayman had their greatest buildup. The fishing resources of these dear-water rias were also spectacular.

Accounts from nineteenth-century travelers speak of eighteen-totwenty-foot specimens of black caymans spaced with great regularity and frequency along the beaches of the rias. The black cayman is clearly the predator at the top of the aquatic food chain. In recent decades development experts have urged the extermination of the black cayman as a means of improving the fisheries, and of converting the nuisance into valuable leather. "Obviously," large populations of the predator at the top of the food chain will depress the populations of the species on which they prey.

The advice of the developmental experts has been followed: twenty-foot specimens of Melanosuchus niger arc almost a thing of the past, but contrary to the expectations of the experts from the overdeveloped world, the fisheries have also largely collapsed. The Indians were right, and the great cayman was indeed The Master of the Fishes, as depicted on the Yauya carving. After the fact, hard science can come up with an explanation that verifies the ecological wisdom of the aborigine (Fittkau I970). The turbid waters of the mainstream of the Amazon are highly charged with chemicals which would support a maximum buildup of the chain of life were the waters not so totally opaque that light penetration and thus photosynthesis are curtailed. The still-water formations within the varzea are clear, or at least clearer, and have the same level of dissolved chemicals as the main-

stream, but not the suspended silt, so that there exist nearly optimal conditions for the growth of large, stable fish populations. The clear waters of the Xingu and Tapajos are almost chemically pure, so that while there is maximum penetration of light, there are insufficient nutrients to support the growth of the one-celled plant life necessary to form the bottom of the food chain.

There are several species of fish in Amazon waters that perform huge annual runs even more spectacular than the well-known annual runs of the salmon in North America. These fish live in the varzea but spawn down at the mouth of the tributary or in the channel of the main river (Goulding 1980). The boca chica is one of the best known of these species. Every year dense masses of such fish are available for a short period of time. The once large populations of black cayman became active during these fish runs and consumed vast quantities of the seasonal windfall. For the rest of the year they gradually excreted into the clear waters of the rias, providing nutrients that allowed a productive and stable fishery to develop (Fittkau I970: 140-I41; Fittkau et al. I975).

Given this understanding of the complex ecology of the rias, it is clear why the great cayman was revered as Master of the Fishes and was perceived as the perfect metaphor for the ceremonial center as a stabilizing mechanism.

THE OBELISK TELLO

All discussions of the Great Cayman as cosmological model must, of course, focus on the Obelisk Tello (Fig. 2) which is itself the archetypal pivot in the sense of the term that Wheatley has developed and elaborated upon."

As Wheatley (I97I) would argue, the Obelisk Tello is a most powerful pivot precisely because it is such a complete and detailed model of the cosmos. The whole cosmos is represented by a Great Cayman who is also Master of the Fishes. This supreme entity is unfolded into the Great Cayman of the Sky, marked by the harpy eagle affix (Fig. 2, top right), and the Great Cayman of the Water and Underworld, marked by the Spondy-

'It is tragic that we do not know how the Obelisk Tello was incorporated into the architectural setting of Chavin de Huantar. I have come to believe that John Rowe's relative dating of the specimen (Rowe I962) is in error and that it predates all other carved stone monuments from the site. I further suspect that it was not carved at the site, but was dragged in when the dominant axis mundi was shifted to Chavin .de Huantar from some site further down in the Marmon drainage, possibly Yauya, In support of this view, [ find compelling the stylistic identities between the Obelisk Tello and the clay relief at Gangay (Ravines and Isbell [975). Garagay ought to be relatively early because of its up-valley rather than astronomically determined alignment (Williams, this volume; also see Burger's [r98r] discussion of the relevant radiocarbon dates).

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ius and Strombus affixes (Fig. 2, top left). The two entities are separated by a membrane (Fig. 2, upper center) on which mundane life takes place. The jaguar is clearly in a subsidiary position and is the channel through which mediation among the various parts of the system takes place. The key cultivated plants are always seen emerging from the nose and mouth of the jaguar.

Arthur Demarest's discussion of the multiple nature of Viracocha in late prehistoric and early historic times provides important support for this model of the Andean world view (Demarest I981). His demonstration of the three-way unfolding of the sky deity (read sky cayman), which in turn was produced by the two-way unfolding of the universe (a universe congruent with that depicted on the Obelisk Tello), is a most elegant example of religious development through progressive differentiation as it was envisaged by Robert R. Marett in the first decade of this century (Marett 19I4: x-xi):

It is, I think, because Wundt mistakes my "pre-animistic religion" for a system of ideas, of alleged priority to animism, that he accuses me of making the evolution of thought proceed from abstract to concrete instead of the other way about. My theory is not concerned with the mere thought at work in religion, but with religion as a whole, the organic complex of thought, emotion and behavior. In regard to religion thus understood I say, not that its evolution proceeds from abstract to concrete-which would be meaningless-, but that it proceeds from indistinct to distinct, from undifferentiated to differentiated, incoherent to coherent.

I have written far more about the interpretation of the Obelisk Tello than can be repeated here (Lath rap [971, 1973, I982). The only apparent paradox in my earlier interpretations (Lathrap I 97 J: 96) is that the Great Cayman of the Water and Underworld ought to be female and represent chaos and regeneration, yet she clearly has the penis. This seems a paradox only when· viewed from our tradition. The ubiquitous South American myth concerning the time when women did have the penis, and how its theft and maintenance gave rise to all of the ceremony surrounding male initiation, immediately comes to mind. The emotional valences and associations which Peter Roc (I982) has recently summarized make this assignment of organs sensible, especially when one is dealing with the .first unfolding of the universe. The upper half of the universe was initially pure structure while the lower half was pure energy and procreative power. We need only note that the properly civilized Desana man (Reichel-Dolmatoff I971) ideally has partially retracted testicles and a small penis. It is the ubiquitous forest demons, totally creatures of the lower half, who have

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huge penes and massive testicles so pendulous that they are swung against the buttresses of ceiba trees to send signal messages.

The only interpretation that I have already promulgated (Lathrap I973: 93-94) and that I should now like to retract concerns the notch at the top of Obelisk Tello and the similar notch at the top of the Lanzon, a feature repeated on a number of the shaft sculptures from the Titicaca Basin. I would now prefer to say that the notch designates that the stone is a very powerful "bar magnet" for supernatural power.

One other icon on the Obelisk Tello should be discussed: the circle within the notched square which occurs on or ncar the notch in the obelisk (Fig. 2, upper center). Its interpretation is essential to the rest of the discussion. This circle represents an orifice in the membrane between the upper and lower halves of the universe through whieh is allowed the flux of supernatural power. In a sense, it could be any of the orifices of the jaguar, but I believe it is the mouth of the jaguar. Further, it represents the circular -depressed courtyard within the rectangular arms of the ceremonial center. The direct comparison with the jaguar mouths at Chalcatzingo (Grove 1968) is appropriate and demonstrates a historical unity. It establishes the earth surface membrane as is indicated on the Yauya carving (Fig. 3). As a point where the power potential of the cosmos can be activated, it becomes a switch in the cosmic circuitry. Its full significance is perfectly bounded by the Quechua term UShl1U, so henceforth we will designate it by that term.

.THE CENTER AS COSMOS

We can then conclude that one of the ways that the Central Andean ceremonial center functioned to deflect and focus the flux of supernatural power was through the arrangement of ushnus (holes in the world membrane) and "bar magnets" within the appropriate architectural frame. This train of thought is worth pursuing a bit further. The well-known sunken courtyard at Tiahuanaco is marked by a tall centrally placed shaft and several other sculptures set around it in what appears to be a nonrandom way. All of these surrounding sculptures are pre- Tiahuanaco, but together they represent a peculiar smorgasbord of early Titicaca Basin sculpture (Ponce I969). The power ofWheadey's global theory suggests to me that we might look for a good historical analogy for this arrangement in Southeast Asia. Wheatley (1971: 431-432) is worth quoting at length on this subject:

Analogous instances of capital cities focusing the supernatural power of a kingdom within their enceintes, and therefore symbolizing whole states, are not difficult to find in the traditional

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world (Frankfort, et al. 1946: 12-13). One of the most instructive examples is afforded by the ceremonial and administrative complex of Yasodharapura, laid out by Jayavarman VII of Cambodia at the end of the r zth century A. D. The centrally situated temple-mountain, known today as the Bayon, consisted essentially of a central quincunx of towers, representing the five peaks of Mount Meru, axis of the world, surrounded by forty-nine smaller towers, each of which represented a province of the empire. According to Paul Mus's elucidation of the symbolism of this structure (1936, 1937), the chapels below the smaller towers housed statues of apotheosized princes and local gods connected with the provinces of the empire, so that the Bayon as a whole constituted a pantheon of the personal and regional cults practised in the various parts of the kingdom. By thus assembling them at the sacred axis of Kambujadesa, the point where it was possible to effect an ontological passage between the worlds so that the royal power was continually replenished by divine grace from on high, Jayavarman brought these potentially competitive forces under his own control.

Thus I am suggesting that each of the subsidiary sculptures represents the "bar magnet," pivot, or axis mundi of a conquered polity. Dragging the "bar magnet" to Tiahuanaco and fusing its power with the power of state is a most appropriate symbol of conquest, and the geopolitical map which resulted, through its accurate modeling of the whole conquest state, made the force of the central pivot even greater. It is certain that several stone shafts and sculptures were in fact transported from the Pucara area to Tiahuanaco (Donnan 1973: 92), thus arguing that the pivot of power was forcibly moved from Pucara to Tiahuanaco at some point in the geopolitical history of the Titicaca Basin. This set of concepts would have made a reasonable prototype for the Inca practice of bringing the living heirs of recently conquered politics to Cuzco.

I take seriously the admonition of Marett (1914). We should be able to model the various steps in the sequence from groups without ceremonial centers to groups with ceremonial centers that arc blatantly obvious in the archaeological record. I will sketch such a developmental sequence, since I believe it will be useful as a background for the concluding argument. The global applicability of Wheatley's thoughts suggests to me that there is no necessity to confine myself to South America in building such a sequence.

We are discussing the creation and maintenance of points of high negentropy in the field of force of supernatural power as such points relate to the

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actual surface of the world. As Adams points out more clearly than any previous anthropologist, the cost of maintaining intensely negentropic points, given the second law of thermodynamics, is high and usually escalating (Adams 1975).

The masks of the Poro society of Liberia seem to me an ideal place to begin our study of the deformation of supernatural power as it relates to real space over the earth's surface (Harley 1950). Visually the masks form a three-tiered hierarchy. The simplest form represents portraits of living men, and these masks are simply alternative vessels for the soul force of an actual living male. A second group, smaller in number, consists of animalhuman mixtures and concentrates a moderate amount of supernatural force. These masks functioned as middle-level bureaucrats running messages, collecting taxes, etc. The top-level masks, the Go ge, are as awesome an icon of naked power as has ever been sculpted. They represent long-deceased lineage founders, and their package of supernatural power equates with the number of generations elapsed, plus the power acquired from the human blood smeared on them. Each time the ownership of the mask passed on, usually from a man to his brother's son, the recipient butchered his own oldest son and anointed the mask with the blood. The uninitiated never saw the powerful masks on pain of death.

By day, and to the uninitiated, the villages of the groups maintaining the Poro society appeared to be independent and egalitarian, with the village headman appearing to have little power beyond the usual palavering, although he usually owned the local Go ge. But at night and when the masks were invoked, taxation, summary justice, and long-distance political and military negotiations were implemented over the full geographical range of the Pore society. There was even a grading of power among the Go ge so that we are dealing with a four-tier hierarchy that implemented political and economic power over much of Liberia.

Which power structure more truly characterized the evolutionary level of the several ethnic units involved in the Poro: the smiling egalitarian village headman of the day, or the effective and autocratic masks of the night? It is even more sobering to the archaeologist to realize, as Harley points out, that not one trace of this complex hierarchy of power implementation could ever be recovered archaeologically (Harley 1950: v).

Let us next turn to New Guinea, to the Iatmul town on the middle Sepik River studied by Gregory Bateson (1936). In his plate VII, the relationship of the men's house to the carefully maintained rectangular dance plaza can be seen; note the small earthen mound in front of the men's house. The dwelling houses arc arranged neatly in the house gardens back from the edge of the plaza and thus out of sight. Here is a town

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plan which could be recovered archaeologically. This plan attracts me since it offers the best ethnographic analogy to the Valdivia culture town of Real Alto (Marcos n.d.; Lathrap ct al, I977).

Within the Iatmul men's house are stock-piled huge numbers of longnosed masks, two-tone signal gongs, preserved ancestral heads, and other forms of ceremonial paraphernalia. Each of these objects concentrates a large amount of supernatural power, so their combined effect produces a massive warp in the field of supernatural force. The maintenance of this force, however, could not be left to chance, so on the small mound in front of the men's house the heads and other butchered parts of enemies were deposited so as to feed the pivot (Bateson 1936: op. pl. VII).

We should now turn to the New World and connect this discussion to the subject of this volume. The malocas of the Tucanoan groups, so perceptively discussed by Isbell (1977, n.d.), have a curious resemblance to the latmul men's house, but they are all-purpose structures usually used as a dwelling and only on appropriate occasions consecrated to become a temple. We will concentrate instead on the Preceramie ceremonial structures of the Huanuco Basin. These structures fit our needs, since beyond doubt these and similar structures at La Galgada (Grieder and Bueno 1981, and this volume) and Aspero (Feldman n. d., and this volume) are the direct historical antecedents of the architecture of the atria at Garagay. The temple at Shillacoto, though less well preserved than the Temple of the Crossed Hands, was much larger and appears to have been the central pivot for the whole Huanuco Basin. This is suggested both by the location and sheer size of the construction, but also by the fact that when the very earliest ceramics appear, they are far more diverse and stylistically sophisticated there than the earliest ceramics at Kotosh. There is a wide range of Tropical Forest fauna depicted, and, as Chiaki Kano (1979; Izumi et al. 1972) has emphasized, the jaguar is represented in quantity and in stylizations which in some ways anticipate that of the Chavin style in the strict sense.

I find even more fascinating the clear depictions of trophy heads, which in some cases I believe must be tsantsa (shrunken heads) rather than fullsized trophy heads. Carlos Angulo Valdes (1981) has recently published a fine monograph on Malarnbo, a site on the flood plain of the Magdelena in Colombia that dates to around rooo B. c. Here, too, there are neat little ceramic models of tsantsa designed for suspension. It would appear then that the tsantsa are far more ancient and far more widespread than one would have guessed from their rather restricted recent distribution. (They probably spread with the first wave of Arawakan expansion starting as early as 3000 B.C.) It is well known that tsantsa arc power receptacles

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(Harner 1972), so the stock piling of tsantsa-or at least the representations of tsantsa-within the temple at Shillacoto gives us another link in the chain of the evolution of power manipulation we have been studying.

Garagay, too, forms a sort of pivot for this paper. We have already seen that the sophisticated architectural plan of the atria (Ravines and Isbell 1975) has its direct antecedents in a range of Preceramic temples scattered over much of Peru. But from where do the wings, which I think arc the cayman jaws, come? If one works backward toward the beginnings of ceremonial architecture in the New World one should eventually find an intentionally constructed pyramid of such insignificant size that it would be hard to see. These specifications fit to perfection the Valdivia II mound under the charnel house at Real Alto (Marcos n.d.). This Ecuadorian mound was intentional and in some sense sacred because there was an offering of a conch shell trumpet under the exact center of the mound. By Valdivia III this feeble beginning generated the large overall planned town with itscarefully maintained plaza (Lath rap et al, 1977). This could wen be the prototype for the wings of La Florida and Garagay, although the evolution from Chuquitanta has also been suggested (Williams 1978-80). However, the Ecuadorian plan is earlier.

The plan of Garagay is typical of the early ceremonial centers of the central coast of Peru. The atrio is of great interest in that details of the modeling of the cayman mouths here are almost identical to the details of sculptural treatment on the mouths of the great caymans on the Obelisk Tello. The Of rend as monster bowls (Lumbreras I971) share the same sculptural conventions. Even more interesting from my point of view is the fact that the stairway ascending into the next highest level of the temple, and presumably the next highest level of sanctity, is guarded by, or perhaps focused by, a pair of cayman heads with the same conventions as the cayman heads on the Obelisk Tello, including the eyebrow treatment. But the feature that most impresses me is the overall plan of the structure. The back of the temple is not a straight line, but shows a series of insets at both corners, a configuration which to me suggests the ushnu on the Obelisk Tello and on the Yauya sculpture. If this feature were idiosyncratic to Garagay, I would not take this convergence seriously, but everyone of the temples published by Carlos Williams (I978-80) has precisely the same configuration, and the terraces which emphasize this configuration at Las Haldas appear to be the most carefully executed part of the complex, or at least so it would seem from Grieder's excellent map (1975). Therefore I conclude that the base of each of these temples is the hinge of a great jaw, and the wings, representing the elongation of the tooth rows, make this jaw a cayman's.

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CONCLUSION

It is the normal reaction of the modern western mind to reject the idea that a ceremonial center ought to look like the cosmos in general or (in Nuclear America) a cayman in particular. The isolating and dichotomizing tendencies we have learned so well from Descartes and Newton make us feel that such a proposition ought to be "illogical." A full reading of Wheatley, however, leaves me with just the opposite expectation. Most of mankind through most of history would have found the expectation "normal," while the Nasca lines and the puma-shaped plan of Cuzco suggest that this mode of thought was not unusual in ancient Peru. At any rate I ask that you suspend judgment until we have looked at certain Mesoamerican examples.

I consider that I have presented sufficient evidence (Lathrap I97I, I973, 1982) to indicate that the basic cosmological system of Mesoamerica and the basic cosmological system of the Centra] Andes are closely related and do in fact derive from the same system. Many of the early ceremonial centers of Mesoamerica show elements of the Andean architectural pattern described by Carlos Williams (I978-80, and this volume). The deep involvement of the cayman in Olmec as well as Chavin iconography has been demonstrated repeatedly. 4

With this background, let look us briefly at a few of the Izapa stelae (Norman I973, I976). The interpretation of Garth Norman seems to me totally convincing, although it is not surprising that I see more caymans than he does. My essential agreement with him is crucial since, just as the Obelisk Tello offers the most complete exposition of the two-way unfolding of the universe into a Sky Cayman and a Water and Underworld Cayman, so the corpus of sculpture from Izapa, along with the famous coffin lid from Palengue, offers the most complete discussion of the ceremonial center as a representation of the cayman's jaws.

We will look first, as he did, at Stela I (Fig. 4). In it we see the loop of supernatural power which is the rain cycle, with evaporation on the lefthand side of the panel, transportation across the top of the panel, and rainfall against the mountains of Chiapas on the right-hand side of the panel. This is simply the idea inherent in Carlos Williams's analysis of architectural plans given a most graphic presentation. The frame of the Izapa stela is the loop, the rope of supernatural power controlling the rain cyele.

"It is worth noting here that the Sky Cayman head in the Mesoamerican Middle Formative goes through progressive simplification, and the double-line break motif. so ubiquitous on Middle Formative ceramics, is the cayman's tooth row. so that every bowl so decorated is sanctified as a cayman's mouth. One is reminded here of the invariant repetition of cayman jaws on the Chavin Of rend as monster bowls.

Jaws

Fig. 4 Stela I from Izapa (after Norman I973: pl. 2).

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Jaws

Fig. 5 Stela 5 from Izapa (after Norman 1973: pl. 10).

copulate U, which forms the rest of the frame, has pyramids in its base so that the whole frame explicitly becomes a plan of a ceremonial center, with these pyramids establishing sighting lines on key points in the composition. There is certainly a strong implication here of astronomical observation. The rain cycle, as demonstrated in Stela I, is again given full expression in this frame. The frame is obviously also a two-headed serpent. Less obviously, but I think still convincingly, the eye-eyebrow motif attached to the right-hand side of the frame turns the whole U into a single mouth, the jaws of the Great Cayman.

Stela 12 (Fig. 6) is simpler. In the center, at a point established by sightings from the pyramids depicted in the base of the frame, sit two priests sending up copal smoke from an incensario. At the top, a realistic jaguar returns rain to the earth from his mouth. A strong affirmation of the rain cycle is again present, and again the frame is strongly labeled as the plan of a ceremonial center. The U is again at first glance a two-headed serpent, -but the eye-eyebrow motif is even more strongly marked here, and the squared teeth of the cayman turn the whole U into the jaws of the Great Cayman.

Lest there be any doubt, we will take a look at the lid of the famous sarcophagus of Palen que (Fig. 7). The realistically depicted man is undergoing apotheosis into a world tree. This ecstatic act is sanctified and positioned by the architectural frame, a full-faced Great Cayman mask at the base with two side-view cayman jaws at the sides. It takes the framing of the jaws of the Great Cayman to localize and maintain a point of purest sanctity in which such an apotheosis could transpire.

In a more leisurely and expansive treatment a wide range of further documentation from later Mesoamerican art could be cited, but here I will note only the five-fold cosmological model from the Codex FejevaryMayer which Norman (I976) and other Mesoamerican scholars (Heyden and Gendrop 1973: 38) have related to the issues under discussion. I could further demonstrate that the frame of the lzapa stelae evolved into the Maya Introducing Glyph.' In the demonstration we would eventually encounter the curious semantic bundle, "fish rope." This idea would seem strange were it not for some clear depictions of fish rope in the art we have been studying. The rope of copal smoke ascending to the heaven is a fish rope: it is the rope of supernatural power by which the world must be continuously maintained and rebuilt. The sanctified hearths, of which we have seen so many in this volume, now become explicable as the built-in equivalent of the Maya incensario. The burning of aji (c. Earle Smith, personal ccrnmu-

There are instances in lzapa sculpture in which the establishment of the axis mundi within the frame is illustrated. The axis mundi is the world-treel ceiba/vertical-cayman. In one case, the cayman is realistically represented, while in others it is highly stylized, but in every case it is the teeth and front claws of the Great Cayman which, as roots, penetrate the earth membrane, thus establishing the axis mundi (Norman 1976).

Stela 5 (Fig. 5) is iconographically the most complex of the Izapa stelae, but only a few features of the frame of the panel need engage our attention. At the top, as is usual, we have the upper jaw and face of the jaguar. The

'Lee Parsons noted this fact before I did (personal communication, 1982).

259

------------------------ ~~~~~~~~~B·E7~MW~o~rewwmsrnmwWH~!~aM~~~~ __ ~ __

!

Donald W. Lathrap

Jaws

Fig. 6 Stela 12 from Izapa (after Norman 1973: pl. 24-).

Fig. 7 Sarcophagus lid from Palenque. Drawing by Merle Greene Robertson.

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nication, 1982) rather than tobacco or copal, .at first seems strange, but certainly aji would produce a most powerful fish rope.

Since my mixture of ideas about real calories and mentalistic structures is somewhat controversial, I will defend my position by ending with a quotation from Adams (I978: 299):

Why must we continue to be drawn (and, indeed, sometimes quartered) between the mental and the material? The career of mankind should make clear that culture continuously resolves the relation of the two by arbitrarily associating particular collectively held meanings with certain energetic, material forms. One would think that the anthropologist, with his claim to the holistic study of man, would long since have accepted that this wholeness lies in a world that is at once symbolic and energetic. This world incorporates images, sensations, and mentalistic configurations, as well as nutritional and chemical material and energetic inputs; both are necessary for the survival and well being of man and his society.

Taken collectively, the species survives and flourishes by fitting these images of the world to the real flows of energy and material, Not every society or sector does this successfully; prehistory and history are littered with earlier dubious attempts. I see no virtue in insisting that we select between these things. Neither extreme position is defensible as a position; the conflict between them simply diverts people from seeking models that can keep the two in perspective. Since the species has succeeded in creating and resolving these opposites, anthropologists should aim to find a way to do it too.

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