Working with stone is a hallmark of ancient and contemporary Andean cultures. Remarkable feats in architecture, engineering, and sculpture attest to the ubiquity of the material and the skill developed in its use. These “cultures of stone” vitalize features of the landscape: a mountain, rock outcrop, or lithic form may be venerated as a wak’a (also written as huaca or guaca), a sacred substance, force, or ancestral being that plays an active role in social and political life.
A small collection of stonework figures and masks made between 500 BCE and 650 CE in what is today northwest Argentina is unparalleled in the region for its artistic expression. The Condorhuasi-Alamito people from Catamarca and Tucumán provinces created astonishingly modern-looking ground-stone sculptural figures known as suplicantes (“supplicants”), so called for their typical kneeling pose and raised faces and hands. These works display a mastery of curved line and negative space (2016.734.3) that have led them to be compared to works by the sculptor Henry Moore (1996.403.17). There are around twenty known examples of these figures, which average twelve inches in height, though they can be twice as tall. Raw material for the suplicantes was chosen for its smoothness and luster, as was the case for the sixteenth-century Inca wak’a. A collection of these suplicantes reside in the Museo de la Plata, Argentina. The figures were laboriously ground and polished into shape from local volcanic rock using hard stone, bone and wooden tools, and abrasive materials. Their provenience, their original context, is often unclear, though generally they have been found in areas that would have been under cultivation. One example was found during archaeological excavations at an Alamito site, a local ritual center.
Equally notable is a group of stylistically related ground-stone masks (2016.734.4, 2016.734.5). These are unique to the period and region; about fifty are known, though most again are unprovenienced. One example was found placed on the legs of the deceased in an excavated burial of the neighboring Ciénaga culture, which shares many features in common with the Condorhuasi-Alamito people. The masks are generally made from volcanic stone and occasionally from a rarer material such as lapis lazuli (2015.598).
Between 500 BCE and 650 CE, northwest Argentina was a nexus of intercultural contact. Fluid, semi-itinerant populations moved along long-distance trade networks connecting the tropical rainforest lowlands of the Chaco and Amazon regions and the southern Andes, caravanning precious stones, feathers, hallucinogens, and shells. The Condorhuasi-Alamito culture is often associated with the Alamito ritual sites, which acted as multicultural focal points for the region. The merging of lowlands and highlands resulted in a hybrid material culture that reflected the cosmological themes of greatest concern to the local populations. The suplicantes and stone masks are windows onto these themes, which included a belief in the animacy of artifacts and materials such as stone and the transformative power of masks.
Ethnohistorical sources reveal that daily life in the Andes was filled with socially meaningful encounters with animate stone beings. Stone images of important ancestors, for example, were venerated by descendent groups as part of funerary cults. The suplicantes may have represented powerful founding ancestors that were placed protectively in the fields of new settlements. Carved monoliths stylistically similar to the Condorhuasi-Alamito artifacts are found near settlements and burials in the neighboring Tafí and Calchaquí valleys, and the erection of monoliths associated with the enduring presence of ancestors has been noted among the contemporaneous Recuay cultures of Peru (1979.206.935).
Masks have a long history in the area, though examples made from stone are rare. A 3,000-year-old copper mask was excavated from the Bordo Marcial site in the Cajón valley; decorative details are minimal, but the mouth and eyes recall those of stone masks. A striking find from the nearby Santa María valley are the remains of two 2,500-year-old masks fabricated from an amalgam of human, animal, and organic materials: leather, wood, plant fiber, resin, bone, teeth, and hair. Gold, silver, copper, wood, and ceramic masks are also commonly found in the burials of other Andean societies from Peru, such as the Nazca, Lambayeque (Sicán) (1979.206.556), and Moche (1987.394.628).
Masking practices are particularly common in the lowlands of the Chaco and Amazon regions, and here we find further clues to the purpose and meaning of the Condorhuasi-Alamito artifacts. Masking is part of a suite of Amazonian practices aimed at stabilizing a body in its human form. Bodies provide a person with their species-specific means of interacting with their world, yet they are susceptible to transformation, victims of the malevolent intentions of spirits or shamans. Only repeated acts appropriate to that species—including the sharing of food and other substances and the modification of bodies through painting, piercing, adornment, and clothing—ensure some degree of ongoing stability. Traces of pigment on several suplicantes and stone masks indicate some figures were painted and may well have been clothed, a tradition also practiced by the Inca in relation to silver or gold figurines (1979.206.336).
Archaeological objects from the Amazon also show a concern with transformation and the body. For example, Konduri ceramics (1000–1500 CE) from the Trombetas river region are decorated with relief heads that change into those of different creatures depending on viewing angle (Museu Integrado de O’bidos, Brazil). The inversion of figure and ground unsettles the eye and produces the impression of a double or unstable reality, resulting in a kind of visual volatility in which forms are simultaneously revealed and concealed. The suplicantes manifest a similar dynamic, with the motif of the face appearing at different scales when a piece is turned, through the stylized forms of limbs, and, in one example, by the doubling of the figure itself (2016.734.3). The negative spaces in the form, moreover, emphasize a body that is both present and absent. (See the La Plata suplicante on p.110 of Néstor Kriscautzky, “Arte y arqueología del noroeste” in Significados y belleza del arte prehispánico de la Argentina: Noroeste, Pampa y Patagonia (2023).) Further, some Condorhuasi-Alamito stone masks include a secondary “face” ground out of the surface framing the mouth and eyes. The DiTella Mask is an example of a mask showing figure-ground inversion from the collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Argentina.
A singular ceramic vessel from the Ciénaga culture reveals the specific relationship between masking and animate artifacts. The vessel is about six inches tall and wide, slightly concave, and buff colored with black painted-line decoration. An anthropomorph sits on the side opposite the handle, its legs and arms forming additional handle-like appendages. It holds a mask perpendicular to the wall of the vessel and hinged at its rim. This mask is identical in every respect to the face it reveals beneath, which protrudes subtly from the surface of the vessel. The form and details of the mask and face closely match those of the stone masks and upturned faces of the suplicantes: a strongly projecting nose, emphatic T-shape brow ridge, and a small round mouth and eyes. Moreover, the position of the hands in relation to the mask recalls that of the suplicantes. Consequently, a face turned skyward, with hands placed to the chin, indexes the lifting of a mask rather than indicating an attitude of supplication.
That is to say, the suplicantes are themselves masked artifacts. And a mask, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro tells us, is a tool and not merely a decorative or carnivalesque object. Masks do not cover up or disguise a face and identity but instead reveal a different being. The hand-to-chin gesture signals transformation, the disclosure of another body that the mask brings to the fore. Thus, it would appear that objects are provided with masks to transform them from raw, vital substances into agents capable of action and able to enter relationships with other beings. This might explain why the mask-style face is so common in the archaeology of the region—in rock art and on other artifacts of ceramic, metal (1979.206.1006), and stone. For example, a stone beaker likely from the southern Andes (2016.734.1) includes a masklike face on its rim. Indigenous traditions of the Americas often attribute animacy to artifacts, depending on the intimacy of their involvement in peoples’ lives. Beakers mediate between liquid substances and human bodies. In this case, the mask might have affirmed the personhood of the beaker and ensured the humanity of the drinker.
The Condorhuasi-Alamito suplicantes and stone masks are therefore the product of a tradition formed by the confluence of the Andean dedication to the agency of stone and the lowland concepts of bodies, masks, and transformation. The suplicantes were, perhaps, powerful lithic persons capable of entering relationships with other beings, including ancestors. The appearance of stone masks in burials suggests, similarly, efforts to harness the capacity of stone to transform the dead into a lithic ancestor, unmasked by the presence of the mask. And one can imagine the “double-masked” Ciénaga culture ceramic vessel as an artistic and philosophical reflection on the transformative and revelatory power of stone and mask.