Image Encounters

Lisa Trever develops a new interdisciplinary approach, which she calls "archaeo-art history," for interpreting images made in deep history, long before writing existed. Reading such murals, she argues, means paying close attention to the material evidence of how they were made and to the way viewers perceived them.

The book is the first fully comprehensive study of the Moche murals of northern Peru, an artistic tradition of the ancient Americas that is still largely unknown. It also gives the first art historical analysis of recently discovered murals at the site of Pañamarca, whose look departs sharply from the murals at earlier Moche sites.

Trever also places Moche mural art in a wider South American setting. She sets it against Pacific coastal traditions of picturing the body and of figural "graffiti" that reach back to roughly 5000 BCE.