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Course: Art of the Americas to World War I > Unit 3
Lesson 13: SicánWhat the bulldozers left behind: reclaiming Sicán’s past
The golden Inverse-Face Beaker from Peru's Sican culture reveals ancient beliefs in supernatural forces. Sadly, much Sican history was lost due to systematic looting and grave robbing. Today, scientific archaeology helps uncover more about this fascinating culture, emphasizing the importance of preserving historical context. Inverse-Face Beaker, 10th-11th century, Sicán (Lambayeque), Peru, gold, 20 x 18.1 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) ARCHES (At Risk Cultural Heritage Education Series) Speakers: Dr. Sarahh Scher and Dr. Beth Harris Special thanks to Dr. Izumi Shimada. Created by Steven Zucker and Beth Harris.
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- Why doesn't Khan Academy do videos about Chavin de Haunter?(4 votes)
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For me, English is the second language. So I can not understand this movie without subtitles.(2 votes)- If you watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1LinuzLQVk you can turn on the closed captions. Something happened on Khan Academy recently that took the captions and other settings off of the videos unless you go outside to get them.(5 votes)
- Why would the Si can's make things out of gold and why did they make them with fangs and cat like eyes?(1 vote)
- Your first question was why these things were made out of gold. I respond that gold is easily worked, and that it's beautiful.
Your second question is why they made these things with fangs and cat-like eyes. I respond that these attributes (fangs and cat-like eyes) were regarded as symbols of power and beauty in their culture, so this was reflected in the art work they produced.(3 votes)
- why would the uncover body bones like have some respect for the people that were bered under the ground like that is just so diserspectful you should leave them there so they can still be peaceful were they probebly wanted to be bered so you should have respect for there dead bodys not to be rude(1 vote)
- So, if a person dies on top of the ground and is not buried, but if that person's body is torn apart by scavengers like Coyotes, and the bones are scattered and eventually get covered over with dirt by natural processes, you would object to the unearthing of said bones?(2 votes)
- speaking of not being able to pin things down other woman laughs ?? like what is she talking about i am so like ? like i dont get it at all(1 vote)
Video transcript
(light music) - [Woman] We're standing in
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and we're looking at a
beautiful gold beaker, the Met calls it an Inverse-Face Beaker. And it's from Sican culture from Peru. This is a thousand years old. - [Woman] It is old, it's
made of hammered gold. And it's called an Inverse-Face Beaker because the way that we're
looking at it is upside down from the way that it would have been used. So a lot of times inversion can deal with the idea of the underworld, or contact with spirit forces. And in fact when we look at this face we can see that instead of
having a regular human mouth, we see teeth that look like feline fangs. And that is a very old motif. - [Woman] And I'm also
noticing that there's something feline about his eyes. - [Woman] We tend to call
those comma shaped eyes, and they are very typical
of the Sican culture. It could be a deity, it
could also be somebody who's transforming into
a supernatural creature or somebody who's simply showing their ability to contact
supernatural creatures. We can't pin it down
with great specificity simply because we don't have writing. - [Woman] Speaking of not
being able to pin things down (other woman laughs) this is an interesting
culture to talk about because so much of what
we could have known is lost because of systematic
looting and grave robbing. - [Woman] One of the
things we need to think about first is to locate ourselves with where the Sican culture is. And they are on the north coast of Peru, they're in about the same
region that the Moche culture were in but they come later. They are near the modern
city of Lambayeque. Sometimes the culture's
actually referred to as the Lambayeque rather than the Sican. The site that this is from
is called Batan Grande, a large area that is covered in mounds and these mounds were once
platforms and pyramids that were made out of adobe bricks and were used as the burial sites of the wealthy elites
of the Sican culture. - [Woman] But so much of
what we could have known about what took place there has been lost. - [Woman] And that is
because for the greater part of the twentieth century, the land that it was on belonged to a wealthy family, the Aurich's. And the Aurich's because
the land was theirs had complete legal right to
dig up anything that was there. Once they discovered that they
had gold on their property, they started mining it. - [Woman] And they took
the agricultural workers and employed them instead
on basically grave robbing. - [Woman] And it happened on
a larger and larger scale. First it was just with picks and shovels, by the end they were using bulldozers. - [Woman] And you can imagine the kind of damage to an archeological
site that a bulldozer would do. - [Woman] What we're losing
in a word is context, we don't know anything
other than it came from Batan Grande and it
probably was from a tomb. And the reason we even know
that it probably was from a tomb is because of scientific excavation that has taken place since then. - [Woman] In the early 1970s
the land was taken away from this family.
- Yes. Due to government land reform. At that point what happened
was the land was given to essentially collective
groups of people to farm and that laid the
groundwork for the ability of scientific researchers,
the foremost of whom is a man named Izumi Shimada. To embark on a long term project to try and find out everything we can about the culture from what's left. - [Woman] What he does is scientific, archeological investigation
that's slow, methodical and in that way we learn so much more. - [Woman] Everybody
thinks about Indiana Jones but Indiana Jones is actually not a particularly good archeologist because he's digging for a single object. And that's what happens here, we have pictures from the
Aurich family archives of a room in their house
filled with nothing but beakers like this one that had been just completely ripped out of the tombs. Well what else is in tombs? There's a lot of things and
it all bares information but none of that was valuable like gold and so it was either tossed aside, or if it was something
less valuable like copper, it was just melted down. - [Woman] What an archeologist is doing is carefully documenting everything. - [Woman] Sometimes down
to grains of pollen. Working on that small of
a level you can find out a lot of information
about the food people ate, what the environment was like, whether or not they were importing goods. And all of that is completely lost. When this kind of looting takes place, one of the unvaluable things that is in the grave, is the body itself. Bones have a huge amount of information. Bones can tell us about what a person did during their lifetime, it can tell us whether somebody was male or female. It can tell us about
gender roles in society. - [Woman] How they died. - [Woman] Sometimes we
love being able to know how somebody died. It can tell you about whether or not they had undergone any
kind of medical procedures. We see skulls being cut into to cure some kinds of brain diseases. You also have information on nutrition and if you're really lucky,
sometimes DNA is preserved and then you can find out
how people were related, you can find out if they were
ruling dynasties over time. And you can also find out from the stable isotopes and tooth enamel whether or not people were from that area or came in from far away. Then all of that's lost when
the skeletons destroyed. - [Woman] When we talk about the Aurich's, we're talking about a
very sophisticated system of looting that takes place on the ground with people who are
poor, who need the money that they earned from the looting. All the way up through middlemen and then eventually
smuggling the artifacts out of the country and
then they make their way to collectors in Europe
and the United States and many of them eventually to museums. - [Woman] A lot of times, the sale and traffic of these objects is intertwined with the
sale and traffic of drugs, but also sometimes as we see
in the Middle-East right now, with the funding of terrorism. - [Woman] It makes sense,
you have to figure out how to bring materials
illegally across borders and who else knows how to do that. - [Woman] Exactly. - [Woman] So this is a complex network, and people are making a lot of money. Unfortunately not the people
who need to make the money. - [Woman] Exactly, a few people
are making a lot of money. The people on the ground
aren't really making a lot of money because
they're already so poor, that small amounts of money to us are actually large
amounts of money to them. - [Woman] The government
of Peru has also made the argument that taking these objects out of Peru depletes the
possibility of tourist income. - [Woman] We see that with
the boom in the creation of new museums in Peru, especially as there are
new archeological finds, again scientific archeology. - [Woman] Grave robbing goes back to the sixteenth century
and to the Spanish. - [Woman] The Spanish would actually set up mining corporations to perform large scale looting operations and one of the biggest examples of that is at the site of the Huacas de Moche, the Pyramid of the Sun and
the Pyramid of the Moon. Only half or a third of the
Huaca del Sol is still with us. This enormous multi-tiered
adobe brick platform, the Spanish formed a mining corporation and literally changed
the course of a river to wash it away like panning for gold, and pan for gold they did. - [Woman] As we're here
looking at this case at The Metropolitan Museum of Art filled with gold objects I have that same sense that we are privileging
these extraordinary objects. - [Woman] Most collectors
and most museum going people aren't going to be
interested in the congealed mass of beads that I saw
in the scientific museum at Sican, where they show
you how a group of necklaces was brought up out of the ground and instead of separating
them and restringing them they show them in context. - [Woman] This display is beautiful. - [Woman] It is. - [Woman] And although
we're missing that context it also helps to draw our
attention to the amazing craftsmanship, to the
sophisticated visual language developed by the Sican people. It draws our attention to this culture in a way that's important. - [Woman] We can't put these
things back in the ground. We can't recover the
context, all of that is lost. But what we can hope for
is that people who see this will have an interest sparked. And that they will become
not only interested in the objects but in the cultures and in finding out more information the scientific way and maybe going to Peru and visiting those museums or volunteering on an archeological dig which is something anybody can do. And really getting to understand the knowledge that's involved. (light music)