Nose Ornament

Nose ornaments created by artists of the Salinar culture, which flourished in the coastal river valleys of northern Peru from around 100 BCE—200 CE, are known for their delicate compositions, achieved by cutting and shaping hammered gold sheet and hammering gold wire. Such ornaments would be suspended from the nasal septum.

In the ancient Andes, metals were first and foremost deployed for the creation of adornments for the bodies of the living and the dead. The sheen of polished metals was visible from great distances, catching the light and distinguishing their wearers from other members of society. These ornaments served as status markers and played an important role in establishing identities. Ornaments both concealed and revealed: parts of the face would be obscured, but they would also add another layer of meaning. Identities were transformed, even erased, as the wearer took on a new state of being—perhaps into a divinity in the case of the living, or into a communal ancestor, in the case of the dead.

The design of the present ornament may represent a spider’s web (see also MMA 1979.206.1172). Spider imagery appears in Andean works of art from the middle of the first millennium BCE until the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century. Spiders were particularly important within the cosmology of Peru’s North Coast for their ability to catch and kill live prey, a skill that linked them to warfare and ritual sacrifice. The Moche, who flourished in this region from 200–850 CE and who are thought to be the cultural successors to (if not the direct descendants of) the Salinar, may have seen the spider’s practice of ensnaring its victim in a web and draining vital fluids as analogous to the way a warrior captured an enemy with ropes and extracted blood. In the North Coast, spiders were further understood to be harbingers of agricultural fertility, as they often appeared before rainfall, an important life-sustaining resource in the arid, desert-like environments of coastal Peru.

References and Further Reading

Alva Meneses, Néstor Ignacio. “Spiders and Spider Decapitations in Moche Iconography: Identification from the Contexts of Sipán, Antecedents and Symbolism.” In The Art and Archeology of the Moche, edited by Steve Bourget and Kimberly L. Jones, pp. 247-261. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.

Alva, Walter, and Christopher B. Donnan. Royal Tombs of Sipán. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, 1993.

Ikehara, Hugo, and David Chicoine. "Hacia una reevaluación de Salinar desde la perspectiva del valle de Nepeña, costa de Ancash." Andes 8 (2011): 153-184.

Pillsbury, Joanne, Timothy Potts, and Kim N. Richter, Editors. 2017. Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum and The Getty Research Institute.