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Course: Art of the Americas to World War I > Unit 3
Lesson 3: ChavínDecoding art: the Staff God relief from Chavín de Huántar (part 1)
This video supports the Smarthistory essay here: https://smarthistory.org/staff-god-chavin/
Speaker: Dr. Naraelle Hohensee. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Video transcript
- [Narrator] The steely
shows the god holding staffs composed of numerous curling forms. Beneath the god's hands,
we see upside down and sideways faces, and
the staffs terminate at the top in two snake heads
with protruding tongues. The god's belt is a
compressed abstracted face with two snakes extending
from where the ears should be, perhaps substituting the snakes for hair and turning the face with
its snake hair into a belt. The god's hands and feet have talons rather than human fingernails, evoking felines and birds of prey.