Sicán Jewellery — The Goldwork of Pre-Inca Lambayeque
Sicán Jewellery — The Goldwork of Pre-Inca Lambayeque
Funerary masks, beakers, and ornaments of the Lambayeque culture, c. 750–1375 CE
Sicán jewellery refers to the body of metalwork produced by the Sicán culture, also known as the Lambayeque culture, of the northern coastal valleys of Peru between approximately 750 and 1375 CE. The Sicán metalworkers represent a high point of pre-Columbian Andean goldsmithing, working in gold, silver, and copper alloys to produce funerary masks, beakers, ornaments, ceremonial implements, and architectural fittings on a scale that places the tradition alongside the earlier Moche and the later Chimú as one of the principal Andean metal traditions. The body of recovered material is large, reflecting both the productivity of Sicán workshops and the substantial archaeological excavation programme that has been conducted at the type site of Batán Grande and at the related site of Túcume since the 1970s under the direction of Izumi Shimada.
Cultural and historical context
The Sicán culture flourished in the La Leche and Lambayeque valleys of the Peruvian north coast, succeeding the Moche tradition and overlapping in time with the Wari occupation of central and southern Peru. The political organisation appears to have been a theocratic chiefdom centred on a hereditary lord identified in the iconography by an almond-eyed mask face, the so-called Sicán Lord, whose image dominates the surviving art. The culture is divided archaeologically into Early, Middle, and Late phases, with the Middle Sicán period (c. 900–1100 CE) being the era of greatest metallurgical production. The site of Huaca Loro at Batán Grande contained an undisturbed elite tomb whose recovery in 1991 yielded approximately 1.2 tons of metal artefacts.
The funerary mask
The Sicán funerary mask is the iconic object of the tradition. The masks are hammered from sheet gold, often gilded copper or tumbaga (gold-copper alloy), and worked in repoussé to produce stylised facial features: large almond-shaped eyes set close together, a triangular nose, and a small mouth. The masks were affixed to the wrapped funerary bundle of the deceased rather than worn in life, and were typically painted with cinnabar to produce a red-faced effect that the conservation literature has documented in detail. Surviving masks are held in the Museo Nacional Sicán in Ferreñafe, in the Larco Museum in Lima, and in major international collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum.
Beakers, ornaments, and the workshop tradition
Beyond the masks, Sicán workshops produced ceremonial beakers in stylised human and animal forms, ear ornaments worked in sheet and granulation, beads of gold and shell strung in elaborate compositions, and architectural elements including sheet-metal facings for adobe structures. The technical repertoire includes hammering, repoussé and chasing, granulation, inlay, soldering with gold-copper alloy solders, lost-wax casting in limited applications, and depletion gilding to produce gold-rich surface layers on tumbaga substrates. The use of tumbaga as the working metal — gold-copper alloys with copper content from twenty to over fifty per cent — was characteristic and reduced the gold content required for a given visual effect.
Looting, repatriation, and the contemporary trade
The Batán Grande and related sites suffered extensive looting from the colonial period through the late twentieth century, and a significant volume of unprovenanced Sicán material reached international collections during that period. Peruvian law has since 1929 vested cultural property in the state, and contemporary trade in unprovenanced Sicán goldwork is illegal under Peruvian law and unethical under the standards adopted by major museums and dealer associations. Buyers of pre-Columbian gold should require documented export prior to 1970 (the date of the UNESCO Convention) or formal export documentation. The Lambayeque region's continuing excavation programme, conducted by Peruvian and Japanese archaeologists, is the principal source of legitimately documented material reaching the academic literature.