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| Nose Ornament with Spiders Salinar Culture 200 B.C.E. - 300 B.C.E. |
For this week's blog post, I decided to pick something from the Salinar culture. This jewelry piece is called the Nose Ornament with Spiders, 1st-century B.C.E.-2nd century C.E. This wonderful piece is made of pure gold. This jewelry is huge to have as a septum, measuring 5.1 x 11.1 x 0.3 cm.1,
This piece is insane and crazy for me to believe in as I know that it probably wasn't super comfy to have such a big piece hanging from your nose covering more than half of your face as it may have been hard to talk or even eat with such a big piece. During this time, many different cultures would wear ornaments on their body, and over time the ornaments began to get bigger and bigger such as this piece here. This piece is very light in weight and flowed very smoothly on a person's face, so it was comfortable to wear. Salinar began flourishing the idea of wearing ornaments that traveled through the river valleys of Northern Peru. They are actually among the earliest body adornments to be discovered in this region. While other similar Salinar ornaments are simple with their structure and form, others- such as this one here are very much more complex when assembling such an intricate piece with strings of gold. This ornament has four delicate round-bodied spiders. Their spindly legs and pincers are carefully decorated in a thin gold wire which would take a lot of patience and time to create each symmetrical one. The craziest thing is circular wirework all around the four spiders that form a delicate web all around. The amount of stress must have been to make sure every circle is symmetrical and even is astonishing to imagine.
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| A closer look at Spiders |
Spider artwork began appearing in Andean works of art as it transformed into more meaningful things to the cosmology of Peru's North Coast. Peru had remarkable hunting skills as they could catch and kill live prey, which was linked to warfare and ritual sacrifice. The Salinar may have seen the spider's practice of trapping its victims in a web and draining the vital fluids the same way warriors would capture an enemy with ropes and extract all their blood. Another important task spiders gave Salinars was being harbingers of soil fertility, as they would appear before rainfall, an important life-sustaining resource they needed due to their desert-like environments.
Nose ornaments were worn from the septum and would often cover their mouth and lower face, but they were specifically made for high-status individuals who were mostly men. During this time, many high-status individuals used the purpose of the nose ornaments to initiate their position of power to others. The bigger the nose ornament is, the high up they are within society. To carry one of these pieces just showed everyone that these men were someone who could guide the ones in need onto the right path. The nose ornaments would even stay on individuals who have passed to help their status be known in the afterlife. This piece is astounding as it is made with thin gold pieces as it took time and skill to prepare these different pieces for their superiors.
Citation:
1The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Nose ornament with spiders," in Smarthistory, March 8, 2021, accessed November 10, 2021, https://smarthistory.org/salinar-nose-ornament-spiders/.