Image Encounters is an exceedingly thoughtful and carefully crafted book. A sequel to Trever’s collaborative volume The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru (Dumbarton Oaks, 2017), it treats murals created by Moche societies on the north coast of what is now Peru, from around 200 to 850 CE. Trever’s definition of murals includes walls that are painted, sculpted, and painted-and-sculpted. This expanded category is, in fact, one of the book’s great contributions.
Examining the precursors to Moche murals in chapter 1, Trever argues that murals in this region were not simply a successor to rock art, as has sometimes been assumed, by showing that the earliest elaborations of earthen walls were modeled rather than simply pictorial (51–52). As she writes of one sculpted figure, it “demonstrated the inexistence of …the conceptual membrane dividing representation and reality” (49). Chapter 1’s survey of really ancient sites (starting in 5000 BCE) might...
University of California Press