WHO: Gordon Ambrosino, Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), United States
Spanish Colonial accounts in the Andes identify landscape features considered to be ancestral beings. These huaca places remain today as lasting testaments to past people’s relations with the land, and as anchors that inform descendent community’s cosmological relations with it. Survey and excavation data from a large complex of rock art in highland contexts are synthesized to produce a typology for the rock art of the region, spanning approximately 4,000 years. This typology is then paired with these Colonial accounts to link specific rock art motifs with named social groups, suggesting that rock art was a means for establishing ancestral connections with huaca.