By Marc Vincent
Reading the lush catalog that accompanies the Cleveland Museum of Art's Wari exhibit, I felt as if I were the first person to discover this civilization that pre-dated the Inca.
The Inca, of course, enjoy a higher profile, with their troves of golden treasure, their mountaintop city of Machu Picchu and their brutal demise at the hands of the Spanish in the 1530s. But "Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes" also fires the imagination.
Like the Inca, the Wari had a major capital city and many provincial centers. The civilization supported a vast and mighty army. And it produced monumental architecture and exquisite textiles and art objects.
Susan E. Bergh, curator of Pre-Columbian and Native North American Art at the Cleveland museum, authored or co-authored one third of the 15 scholarly essays in "Wari" and masterfully organized their compilation. The catalog sheds light, too, with 275 illustrations, most in full color.
Beginning around A.D. 600, probably spurred by drought, the Wari spread into neighboring territories in search of arable land. In the process, they created the first empire in the Americas, encompassing snowcapped mountains, coastal deserts and tropical rain forests. And they accomplished this without the aid of writing, wheeled vehicles or draft animals. For 400 years, the Wari empire was the biggest, wealthiest and most complex nation-state in the Andes region, until it slowly vanished around the year 1000.
The challenges of Wari studies have been taken up only in the last half-century. Like all pre-Columbian Andean civilizations, the Wari did not use writing. Unlike the Inca, no Spanish eyewitnesses chronicled their achievements. And in the 1980s, the Shining Path guerillas hampered Peruvian archaeology.
This book, then, illuminates both beautiful objects and recent scholarship.
Two introductory chapters describe the rise of the Wari and their interaction with neighboring peoples. In the heart of the catalog, entitled "Transforming the World," 11 essays treat such varied topics as the built environment, the art of feasting, ceramics, tapestry-woven tunics, feather work and figurines.
A final essay describes the legacy of the Wari in the region.
The ruins of the Wari capital (also called Wari) are overrun by vegetation, but archaeologists have discovered monumental ceremonial structures, D-shaped temples, royal tombs, open plazas and large rectangular compounds of two to three stories. At its height, the city was home to 40,000 people and was as big as Roman London. But it was also dark and disorienting, with few gates, high walls and labyrinthine alleys.
An elaborate network of roads linked the capital with administrative centers throughout the empire. And the countryside itself was dotted with terraced fields, canals and aqueducts to ensure plentiful supplies of food and water.
The Wari attached special significance to ritual feasts, which bound groups together, reinforced status and relationships and channeled the energies of large labor forces. The Wari devoted a substantial portion of their economy to feasting, crafting elaborately decorated vessels for "chichi" (maize beer) which were often ritually smashed afterwards.
Second in importance to food was the weaving of textiles for tunics and mantles. Some tunics incorporated an astonishing 18 miles of yarn. Decorations could involve intricate and systematic distortions of forms: motifs closest to the center were expanded, while those to the sides were condensed, a pattern unique in pre-Columbian culture that may reflect an interest in mathematics and geometry.
The Wari empire gradually collapsed, perhaps because of internal rebellions, climatic changes, overextension or illness. They abandoned provincial centers gradually and with systematic ritual, sealing off rooms and houses as populations decreased. It would be another 300 years before the Inca appeared on the scene.
The catalog encourages ongoing reflection about "our understanding of early human experiments with civilization." Its authors acknowledge that much work remains to be undertaken by archaeologists and art historians.
This reader was ready to buy a ticket to Cuzco, eager to see the Wari ruins firsthand. But fortunately, through Sunday, Jan. 6, one can visit the Cleveland Museum of Art to savor Wari artifacts.Marc Vincent is a professor of art history at Baldwin Wallace University.