Pre-Columbian art on Fotopedia

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Pre-Columbian art is the visual arts of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, North, Central, and South Americas until the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and the time period marked by Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas.

Pre-Columbian art thrived throughout the Americas from at least, 13,000 BCE to 1500 CE. Many Pre-Columbian cultures did not have writing systems, so visual art expressed cosmologies, world views, religion, and philosophy of these cultures, as well as serving as mnenomic devices.

During the period before and after European exploration and settlement of the Americas; including North America, Central America, South America and the islands of the Caribbean, the Bahamas, the West Indies, the Antilles, the Lesser Antilles and other island groups, indigenous native cultures produced a wide variety of visual arts, including painting on textiles, hides, rock and cave surfaces, bodies especially faces, ceramics, architectural features including interior murals, wood panels, and other available surfaces. Unfortunately, many of the perishable surfaces, such as woven textiles, typically have not been preserved, but Precolumbian painting on ceramics, walls, and rocks have survived more frequently.

TEXT FROM WIKIPEDIA, cba SOME RIGHTS RESERVED.

Huaca de la Luna

Huaca de la Luna ("Temple/Shrine of the Moon") is a large adobe brick structure built mainly by the Moche people of northern Peru. Along with the Huaca del Sol, the Huaca de la Luna is part of Huacas de Moche, which is the remains of an ancient Moche capital city called Cerro Blanco.

The Huacas de Moche site is located 4 km outside the modern city of Trujillo, near the mouth of the Moche River valley. The Huaca de la Luna, though it is the smaller of the two huacas at the site, yields the most archaeological information. The Huaca del Sol was partially destroyed and looted by Spanish conquistadors in the 17th century, while the Huaca de la Luna was left relatively untouched. It is believed today that the Huaca del Sol may have been more administrative, military, residential and burial mound for the Moche elite, while the Huaca de la Luna served a largely ceremonial and religious function, though it contains burials as well. Though today the Huaca de la Luna is colored the soft brown of its adobe brickwork, just after its construction it would have been an impressive site to behold. The huaca was decorated in registers of murals which were painted in black, bright red, sky blue, white, and yellow. The sun and weather has since faded these murals away, but other murals used in earlier phases of construction can still be seen inside the Huaca. Many of these depict a deity now known as Ayapec. "Ayapec" is a pre-Quechua word translating as all knowing. "Wrinkle-Face" is the name given to another deity by the later Inca because of the deity's appearance.