Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru is a welcome addition to the literature on the art of ancient Peru. The Moche were a state-level society who prospered in the first seven or so centuries AD on the desert coast of what is now northern Peru. They were prolific and prodigious artists in many media, the most famous being metalwork, the most numerous being ceramics. The gold-filled graves at Sipán and other Moche sites have been discovered in the last twenty years, and much progress has been made in our knowledge of this important ancient American society and its art.

Christopher Donnan is certainly the person to write on the subject of Moche ceramics, as he is a well-respected and experienced archaeologist and scholar of Moche art, and the author or co-author of some eighteen publications over his career. His publications span archaeological reports and wide-ranging iconographic surveys, and this focused study of the ceramic record makes good use of the very exciting discoveries of Moche burials and structures that have taken place since the late 1980s. Thus, he is able to bring to bear a great familiarity with the ceramic painting corpus while incorporating new and detailed excavation findings about actual rituals in order to place the portrait vessels in context. This makes the book both a satisfying synthesis and a foray into new territory.

Donnan’s work is a pleasure to read; the prose is consummately clear and never falls prey to jargon. In all his publications, especially this one, the photographs and the text are perfectly interdigitated so that it is simple to follow the argument and enjoy the works of art fully. Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru, in fact, is illustrated entirely in color (as well as a series of elegant and informative line drawings); the resulting visual aspect is sumptuous. Donnan works from the images outward, making this a very art historical work, albeit written by an archaeologist.

In researching this book Donnan studied circa nine hundred portraits culled from the more than 160,000 photographs in the Moche Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles. This was a huge task in organization alone, especially considering how elaborate the headdresses, ornaments, face paint, and features are on each example. Like a giant game of cards, he was able to find the matches in this welter: the various portraits of the same individuals, some showing younger and older images of the same man (all are of men). Certain individuals had more than forty portraits survive, such as a distinctively scarred individual Donnan nicknames “Cut Lip,” the subject of a later chapter. No one had previously done this tedious but revealing research, which makes for a groundbreaking book.

The author takes on a series of important questions about the portraits: their essential characteristics, development through time, creative process, spatial distribution, subjects’ identities, motivation for the production of portraits, and function in society. While he covers all these topics, and some in depth, others do not yield conclusive interpretations (and may not at this time, as Donnan admits). The technological description of how the portrait vessels were created, accompanied by thirty-six line drawings, is very complete. Characterization of the various types of headgear, ornament, and face painting worn by Moche men also provides useful data. Convincing groupings of portraits of the same individual, but wearing different ornaments and face patterns, show that there was no “official” portrait but rather a series of them in which the man’s various attire and body art were commemorated by different artists. Donnan correlates these multiple ensembles to the many sets of earspools and headdresses found with the deceased in the graves at Sipán and elsewhere. He does not venture, however, into more interpretative ground—indeed he does not go very far into the book as a whole—such as examining how the various costumes related to ceremonial or political needs.

He does place the subjects into a larger iconographic program he calls the “Warrior Narrative,” which culminates in the well-known “Sacrifice Ceremony.” Donnan further relates the portraits to the recent excavations at the Moche capital that uncovered some seventy sacrificial victims surrounded by broken unfired portrait vessels. Disappointingly, he concludes we do not have any idea what this could have meant, ignoring the widespread ancient American practice of the ritual killing of art (often seen as an acknowledgment that art is alive and that the portrait holds the life force of an individual and therefore must be analogously treated to the body). Exploring the implications of the unfinished nature of the broken pots, perhaps conceptually tied to demoting the victims’ status or sacrificing people in their prime—i.e., not finished with life—would have been interesting.

The chapter on Cut Lip arrays his portraits from boyhood through middle age, illustrating twenty-six of the forty extant images. With so many photographs, the reader does not have to take the author’s word for much, but rather can study the corpus herself or himself. This is a great service to the field, allowing others access to works of art spread in many collections and the UCLA archive. It also serves as a valuable teaching resource, well suited to assign to undergraduates (a great need in the literature on ancient American art).

Donnan’s conclusions are straightforward yet add new information such as the wear and tear on portrait vessels and the place of portraiture in the overall Moche oeuvre. Only here at the end of the book does he mention a real date (a major ecological, political, and aesthetic disruption ca. AD 562–594), having previously used the internal Moche phases (I–V), which might have been frustrating for the general reader. While one might have wished for a bit more interpretive depth, the book leaves a positive feeling. It breaks new ground, shows us the stunning artistry of a century or so of Moche ceramic creation, and lets us get to know some of the individuals who were alive and often then sacrificed. A beautiful book, based on impressive research, graceful and accessible, Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru comes highly recommended.