An ancient ceremonial building built thousands of years ago in the La Libertad region of northwestern Peru is adorned with a painting of a spider deity holding a knife. Archaeologists discovered the mural in November 2020 after local farmers damaged the temple structure during the expansion of their sugarcane and avocado plantations.
When scientists examined the monument (“huaca” in the indigenous language family Quechuan), they found a figure on the southern wall against a white background, in ocher, yellow and gray. reported the Peruvian national daily La República.
Régulo Franco Jordán, director of archaeological investigations for the Augusto N. Wiese Foundation, a Peruvian cultural non-profit organization, recently told La República that the huaca is about 3,200 years old and probably has ritual significance. The figure in the mural was “a stylized zoomorphic creature” – a human-animal hybrid god – that could be a partial spider, which was an important animal in pre-Columbian Cupisnique culture, Jordán said (translated from Spanish with Google Translate).
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The wall that contains the wall of the spider looks like a river that crosses the Virú Valley, according to La República. This probably meant that the deity had a connection with water, and that sacred ceremonies were probably held in the temple during the rainy season between January and March, according to Jordán according to the highest water levels in the river.
The Cupisnique culture prevailed on the north coast of Peru from about 1250 BC to 1 AD, and indigenous people produced the first known temples of the region during that time, according to Larco Museum, a private museum in Lima showcasing pre-Columbian art. Spider gods have been frequently featured on pots and cups, and are associated with fertility, the Peruvian National News Agency Andina report.
About 60% of the temple was destroyed by the farmers’ construction; all that was left was a small building that was about 5 feet long and 15 feet wide. To protect the huaca – named “Tomabalito” after El Castillo de Tomabal, another archeological site in the area – Jordán contacted the Peruvian Ministry of Culture’s decentralized office in La Libertad and asked for an “emergency intervention”. export to restrict access to the site. to the present coronavirus restrictions are lifted according to Andina.
“The site has been registered and the discovery will be covered until the pandemic is over and it can be properly investigated,” Jordán told La República.
Originally published on Live Science.