The Cupisnique-Chavín Religious Tradition in the Andes
Authors: Ikehara-Tsukayama Hugo C. 
Published: September 2023

Between 1400 and 500 bce, communities of the central Andes gradually adopted a visual culture dominated by images of predation in nature. Fangs became pervasive in images and were incorporated into beings that naturally lacked them, such as humans and birds. Composite beings, articulating parts of different predators, became popular, being depicted in multiple media. This shared visual culture resulted from the expansion, adoption, and local adaptation of the Cupisnique-Chavín religious tradition, one of the earliest and most clear cases of religious integration in the Andes.

The results of archaeological research in the 20th and 21st centuries have provided abundant information to approximate the ritual practices associated with this religious tradition. In the ceremonial centers—designed to accommodate large audiences—friezes and sculptures depict nonhuman beings with attributes of predators. During ceremonies, people feasted, played music, shared knowledge and experiences, and interacted with these images of supernatural characteristics. The middens surrounding these temples are filled with the remains of these activities, such as broken ceramics, food remains, ritual paraphernalia, and even friezes—discarded during work feasts dedicated to architectural renovation.

Traditionally, these images depicted in sculptures and friezes have been considered representations of a pantheon of divinities. These interpretations were based on theoretical assumptions about the relationship between sacred and profane, nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and personhood. In theoretical frameworks that reevaluate the ontology of Indigenous people of the Ancient Americas—such as adaptations of Viveiros de Castro’s multinatural perspectivism and theory on Andean huacas—these stone sculptures, buildings, and landscape features can be considered powerful nonhuman persons and important members of the communities.

These ancient Andean beings must have acquired power from their relationship with the community and local landscapes. This sets them apart from the view of omnipresent divinities in modern world religions. In a world where one’s knowledge is acquired through experiencing the world, a way to acquire new knowledge may have involved seeing the world through the eyes of other beings. In the Cupisnique-Chavín world, the most powerful and wise of these nonhuman entities may have been those stone beings with multispecies abilities housed in the temples. The institution of pilgrimage may have emerged because of the need to acquire new knowledge from these extraordinary beings believed to dwell throughout the central Andes.

While scholarly research is thriving in the first decades of the 21st century, there are obstacles in the way of sharing these results with the nonscholarly public. Involuntarily, the reconstruction of the ceremonial temples has created solemn and sterile images of these ancient ceremonial temples, very far from the archaeological description of the findings in these places. This creates a continuing gap between what is known about these Cupisnique-Chavín ritual practices—and the role of the nonhuman in them—and the perception of the public as to this tradition.