A Moche Riddle in Clay: Object Knowledge and Art Work in Ancient Peru

In 1899, a German archaeologist in northern Peru excavated an enigmatic ceramic bottle from an ancient Moche tomb. The vessel's deathly potato-head chamber is marked by a plethora of human/tuber "eyes" that are further conflated with stones regurgitated from a sea lion's gut. This replete object, which represents a subject at once human, animal, vegetable, and mineral, bears multiple currents of meaning and manifestations of indigenous knowledge. Though not an "art object" in its own time, the vessel and others like it embodied "complex intentionalities" in the sense of Alfred Gell's "artwork."