No need for the bullwhip, the fedora, the bomber jacket and the pistol.
You can be Indiana Jones and discover a lost civilization simply by visiting the Cleveland Museum of Art’s free new exhibition on the Wari culture of ancient Peru.
Centuries before the Incas built Machu Picchu, the Wari ruled over an area as big as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana that stretched from the snow-capped Andes to a swath of desert along the Pacific.
They had no wheels or draft animals, no paper and no written language. They kept records by tying knots in garlands of string called “khipu.” Yet they built massive cities, canal systems, aqueducts and reservoirs. They terraced hillsides and raised crops that fed armies of workers and fueled an urban culture that produced stunning textiles and ceramics.
Then, for reasons that baffle scholars, the Wari vanished a thousand years ago, leaving their tombs and crumbling cities for posterity to discover.
The show includes immense ceramic vases, used to ladle out stew and corn beer in rituals of faith and power by Wari ruler-priests and then deliberately smashed and left in enormous heaps.
Also on view in “Wari: Lords of the Andes” are brilliantly hued textiles woven with complex, quasi-abstract images of Wari deities; spouted vessels shaped like llamas, fish, seashells, human heads and grinning skulls; and garments made of colorful tropical feathers that show no sign of having faded.
One small, fascinating and chilling wood object from the museum’s own collection, a cackling, feline-headed “sacrificer,” slides a knife across the neck of an unfortunate human victim, whose head apparently will be added those already dangling from the killer’s belt.
It’s all a revelation, and it makes you wonder why the Wari — apparently once so powerful — vanished from history.
They had no contact with Europeans bearing smallpox and blunderbusses, which rules out a “Guns, Germs and Steel” catastrophe of the kind described by author Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name.
Did the Wari collapse from a Malthusian disaster in which their numbers grew faster than their food supply? Were they wiped out by disease? Were they conquered by the neighboring Tiwanaku, based on the south side of Lake Titicaca in present-day Bolivia?
No one knows. According to the exhibition’s fascinating catalog, the Wari sealed off portions of their cities as their population shrank. It was as if the impoverished heirs to an English country estate were shutting down the wings of their inherited mansion as they fell further into poverty.
Looting in the last century partially denuded some Wari sites but also propelled exquisite objects into the marketplace — and, eventually, into many of the world’s leading museums.
Today, Wari culture remains one of the least well-understood cultures of ancient Latin America. Archaeologists began exploring Wari colonial sites in the early 20th century, but at first they confused the culture with that of the neighboring Tiwanaku.
Interest in the Wari has also suffered from a subtle cultural bias. Their claustrophobic, defensive-looking cities lacked the grand assembly spaces and spectacular pyramids of the Maya. Unlike the Inca, their capital didn’t occupy a jungle mountaintop. And they didn’t leave behind vast quantities of objects made of gold.
Because they had no written language, the Wari speak only through their artifacts, which raise many more questions than they answer.
In recent years, Peru’s Shining Path revolutionaries, who tried to establish a Maoist state in south-central Peru, stymied excavations in the core of Wari country.
With the conflict now over, scholarly interest is on the rise, along with Peru’s desire to stimulate tourism in the Ayacucho region, the ancient Wari heartland.
Organized by Susan E. Bergh, the Cleveland museum’s curator of Pre-Columbian and Native American art, the Wari exhibition is the first major show of its kind at an American museum. The exhibition highlights what is known about the Wari today — and how much more remains a blank.
Much of the ancient capital city of the Wari, also known as Wari, has yet to be explored. Bergh described it as an archaeologist’s dream. It’s 2.3 square miles of largely untouched rubble choked with cactus. Systematic digging can begin once money is raised to secure the site against looting areas under excavation.
“It’s somebody’s lifetime to make a commitment to the site,” she said.
Bergh, who intended originally to study the Inca in graduate school at Columbia University, found herself by happenstance immersed in the Wari both at the Brooklyn Museum and, later, at the Cleveland museum.
In 2007, she proposed to former museum director Timothy Rub that the institution organize a show on the culture, and he found the idea compelling.
“Timothy liked it because it’s an area in which research is ready to pop,” Bergh said.
With grants from the Getty Foundation and other sources, Bergh surveyed Wari materials scattered among museums on three continents and built a database of more than 3,000 objects.
She then assembled a checklist of the crème de la crème from that list for the exhibition, which will later travel to Florida’s Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale and the Kimbell Art Museum in Forth Worth, Texas.
Much of the material in the show is astonishing. Wari textiles combine highly sophisticated weaving techniques with complex imagery that embeds deities, attendants and sacrificers in dense, nearly indecipherable geometric patterns.
Organized in vertical bands interspersed with areas of solid color, the Wari images are strangely and systematically distorted and compressed as they repeat at their edges, creating versions of the principal motifs that look mysteriously squeezed. No one knows the meaning of these distortions, Bergh said.
An intriguing ceramic bowl in the show, decorated with an image of a powerful, staff-wielding deity, bears the head of a long-beaked raptor. It's a mystery why the bowl is decorated with patterns of X’s, divided into two groups of 28 and 36. Is it an ancient form of accounting? A schedule? A calendar?
The exhibition is an invitation to ponder these and many other questions, while marveling at the sheer inventiveness of Wari art. It’s easy to be mesmerized by the brilliant decorative patterns on the woven, square-shaped hats worn by the Wari, or by a ceramic vessel shaped like a crouching person blowing a whistle resembling an animal head.
Amazingly, many of the Wari artifacts look entirely fresh, thanks to having been buried for centuries in the dry sands of the Peruvian desert, the perfect environment to preserve ancient treasures.
Of the 146 ancient objects in the show, 26 come from legitimate archaeological excavations, nine were found by locals who later spoke to archaeologists, and another 28 came from known sites, although their immediate archaeological context is unknown, Bergh said.
That means that more than half of the objects in the exhibition cannot be traced to their original “find sites” and may be presumed looted.
Yet Peruvian authorities enthusiastically loaned more than 30 objects from half a dozen national and regional museums. At no point did they question the ownership history, or provenance, of objects provided by the Cleveland museum and dozens of other institutions around the world, Bergh said.
Apparently, Peru decided it has much more to gain by fostering global appreciation of one of its cultures than by forcing museums to repatriate objects that originated on its soil — as Turkey is attempting to do.
“Wari: Lords of the Andes” is more than an invitation to explore ancient mysteries. It’s also a model of international artistic cooperation.