Title: Moche Mural Painting at Pañamarca
Description: This dissertation is a study of the late Moche murals found within the adobe temples of Pañamarca, Peru (ca. 600-850 CE). This project was designed to redress the problem of iconographic decontextualization of the Pañamarca paintings that, through limited documentation and repetitive scholarly publication, had become effectively untethered from their material moorings and spatial settings. New fieldwork succeeded in contextualizing and conserving remains of all known mural paintings. This field research also resulted in the discovery of a new corpus of paintings at the site. Together these paintings form a case study on image making and visual experience in a Pre-Columbian era without contemporaneous writing.