Nose ornament

Nose ornaments, usually suspended from the nasal septum, served as indicators of status and identity in communities on Peru’s North Coast in antiquity. Such ornaments often obscured the mouth when worn, leading some scholars to suggest they also played a protective role, guarding a vulnerable opening to the body from bad spirits. Made from precious metals, these crescent-shaped works were the focus of immense creative exploration in the first millennium of the Common Era.

Affixed to a silver crescent with an oval-shaped opening at the center for attachment to a nasal septum, a golden band of snails glides upward toward the two ends of the ornament. The band of snails was cut from a sheet of hammered gold and then worked from behind (repoussé) to raise the figures of the animals. The gold band was then joined to the central silver crescent by small tabs pushed through the silver. The significance of snail imagery is unclear, but painted depictions on Moche ceramics illustrate elaborately dressed individuals collecting snails in net bags (see, for example, Donnan and McClelland 1999: 120-121). Their finery implies that snail gathering was not simply the collection of mollusks for a meal but part of a specific ritual.

The Moche (also known as the Mochica) flourished on Peru’s North Coast from 200-850 CE, centuries before the rise of the Incas. Over the course of some seven centuries, the Moche built thriving regional centers from the Nepeña River Valley in the south to as far north as the Piura River, near the modern border with Ecuador, developing coastal deserts into rich farmlands and drawing upon the abundant maritime resources of the Pacific Ocean’s Humboldt Current. Although the precise nature of Moche political organization is unknown, these centers shared unifying cultural traits such as religious practices (Donnan, 2010).

This ornament was said to have been found at a site or sites known as Loma Negra, which was a northern outpost of Moche culture. Loma Negra works in metal share similar iconography with ceramics and metalwork found at Moche sites father to the south, such as Ucupe (Bourget, 2014). The exact relationship between Loma Negra and the Moche “heartland” remains a subject of debate, however (Kaulicke, 2006).

References and Further Reading

Bourget, Steve. Les rois mochica: Divinité et pouvoir dans le Pérou ancien. Paris: Somogy éditions d'art. Geneva: MEG, Musée d'ethnographie de Genève, 2014.

Castillo, Luis Jaime. “Masters of the Universe: Moche Artists and Their Patrons.” In Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas, edited by Joanne Pillsbury, Timothy Potts, and Kim N. Richter, pp. 24-31. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017.

Donnan, Christopher B. “Moche State Religion.” In New Perspectives on Moche Political Organization, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Luis Jaime Castillo, pp. 47-69. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010.

Donnan, Christopher B., and Donna McClelland. Moche Fineline Painting: Its Evolution and its Artists. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History/ University of California, Los Angeles, 1999.

Kaulicke, Peter. “The Vicús-Mochica Relationship.” In Andean Archaeology III, edited by William H. Isbell and Helene H. Silverman, pp. 85-111. Boston: Springer, 2006.

Quilter, Jeffrey, and Alexis Hartford. "Nose Ornaments: A General Typology and Moche Case Study." Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 77, no. 1 (2022), pp. 283-302.

Schorsch, Deborah. "Silver-and-Gold Moche Artifacts from Loma Negra, Peru." Metropolitan Museum Journal 33 (1998), pp. 109-136.