Our use of color to express who we are, where we come from and what we care about plays a significant role in our daily lives. Archaeologists compared the hues on different pieces of prehistoric Peruvian pottery in a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. They found that the ceramics used in the ceremonies were produced by potters from across the Wari Empire using the same deep black color, demonstrating the empire’s influence.
The Wari Empire spanned the Peruvian highlands and coastal regions from 600 to 1050 A.D. “People sometimes think of the Inca as the first great empire in South America, but the Wari was the first,” says Luis Muro Ynonan, the study’s corresponding author and research associate and former postdoctoral fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago.
The Wari did not leave behind a written record (or at least a system similar to the one we use now). “Because they didn’t use writing, material culture—things like pottery—would have been an important vehicle for conveying social and political messages,” says Muro Ynonan. “The visual impact of these objects would be super strong.” Even small details, such as using the right shade of paint, could help show the object’s importance and legitimacy as part of the empire.
“I remember seeing some of these Wari-influenced pots as an undergraduate archeology student in Peru, they’re fascinating,” says Muro Ynonan. “The deep black color on them is very striking, I’ve been obsessed with it for years.” Muro Ynonan finally took his interest in pigment in depth during his postdoctoral position at the Field Museum.
He and his co-authors, including Donna Nash, associate curator at the Field and associate professor and chair of anthropology at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, examined ceramics from various Wari-influenced areas, focusing on the chemical composition of the black pigment. used.
The exact formulation of the pigments varied from place to place, but overall there was one striking similarity: many of the Wari pots examined in the study used a black pigment made from minerals containing the element manganese.
“Some places, specifically in northern Peru, used a different recipe for black before the arrival of the Wari, using minerals rich in iron and calcium, but after the Wari took over, they switched to manganese-based recipes,” says Muro. Ynonan.
This shift leads the authors to suspect that the Wari Empire enforced some kind of “quality control” over ceramics produced in different regions, perhaps even supplying the artisans with the “correct” black pigment. “In general, the black minerals are fairly easy to get from the valleys we’ve been looking at,” says Muro Ynonan. But just any old black mineral didn’t match the official Wari look – instead, they think the artisans may have been supplied with manganese-containing minerals from the Wari capital to create the right shade of black.
The changes in hue are subtle, but Muro Ynonan says the symbolic meaning of using “black Wari” may have been very important. “Generally, in the Andean region, the color black is related to the ancestors, to the night, to the passage of time. In Wari times, color was probably important in introducing a specific Wari ideology to the communities they conquered.
While the colors on Wari pottery may indicate imperial control, pottery from different regions retains its own local character. “The local potters had great flexibility in creating a hybrid material culture, combining the Imperial style and Wari decoration with their own,” says Muro Ynonan. The pottery was unified by the use of black pigments, which were controlled and circulated by the Wari Empire through its imperial trade channels, but from there the artists could pursue their work on their own.
“What I hope people take away from this study is that every beautiful artifact you see in a museum was made by real people who were very intelligent and had specific technologies to achieve their goals,” says Nash, co-author of the study. . “Furthermore, these people shared technology and made decisions. Craftsmen talked to each other and learned from each other, but sometimes there were multiple ways of doing things, such as making black lines and decorating on a decorated pot. These different approaches to the same problem may have persisted because of wealth or class differences, but it may have been that some people were willing to try new things while others preferred their traditions.”
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