La Mina
La Mina: A Royal Moche Tomb focuses on La Mina, an extraordinarily rich tomb that was looted on the north coast of Peru in 1987. The ceramic and metal objects it contained were among the most extraordinary ever produced in the Andean area, and it had the most colorfully decorated pre-Columbian burial chamber ever found in the Americas. The artifacts are now scattered throughout the world, nearly all of them held in private collections. In this work Donnan reveals how he was able to locate and document many of the tomb's contents and determine how the tomb was constructed and embellished.
With more than two hundred color images of the archaeological treasures unearthed at La Mina--remarkable works in ceramic and metal that are among the greatest masterpieces of art from the ancient world--students and scholars will welcome the mystery of how careful archaeological sleuthing can piece together valuable information to recover what seemed to be unrecoverable.
La Mina: A Royal Moche Tomb is an astonishing book, both in terms of the extraordinary quality of the works under discussion and the remarkable insights the author brings to bear on the subject. It is a monumental achievement and an incomparable contribution to the field of Andean archaeology and art history.'--Joanne Pillsbury, editor of Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru
Christopher B. Donnan is a professor emeritus in UCLA’s Department of Anthropology. He has researched the Moche civilization of ancient Peru for more than fifty years, combining a systematic analysis of Moche art with numerous archaeological excavations. His works include Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru, Moche Tombs at Dos Cabezas, Moche Fineline Painting: Its Evolution and Its Artists, Royal Tombs of Sipán, Ceramics of Ancient Peru, and Moche Art of Peru: Pre-Columbian Symbolic Communication.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter One. Introduction
Chapter Two. Inventory of the Metal Objects
Chapter Three. Excavating the Looted Tomb
Chapter Four. Additional Ceramics from the Looted Tomb
Chapter Five. Conversations with the Looter
Chapter Six. Lingering Questions
Chapter Seven. Dos Cabezas
Chapter Eight. El Brujo
Chapter Nine. Observations and Conclusions
Notes
References Cited
Illustration Sources
