A Survey of Ancient Peruvian Art. 361 



"tears." There is an area of ornamentation on the breast made 

 up of a new variation of the VT" sign edged with feather- 

 like ornaments reminiscent of Proto-Chimu art and Proto-Nasca 

 art. (See Plate I, FigurejR, and Plate III, Figure 3.) This 

 feather-motif occurs many flmes on the stone. The garment of 

 the personage reminds us of that on the Weeping God of Tia- 

 huanaco in that it is a short skirt-like affair. The puma-heads 

 that adorn the upper edge of the Tiahuanaco figure's skirt have 

 here become so conventionalized that it is nearly impossible to 

 recognize them. The fringe of human faces on the Tiahuanaco 

 skirt has become mere unadorned rectangles. The arms, it is 

 well to note, are in exactly the same position and much the same 

 in shape both here and on the monolithic gateway. But a marked 

 difference is found in the hands. At Tiahuanaco we found the 

 hands of the Weeping God were fairly close to nature in their 

 modelHng despite the fact that they had but four digits. Here, 

 on the other hand, we find a wider departure from realism in 

 the drop to but three digits and in the elaboration of the finger 

 nails into a decorative element. In the two staves we discover 

 a still wider departure from the original theme. The staves are 

 almost exactly alike, which is in itself a significant matter. They 

 have been widened so as to make room for the immensely elab- 

 orate ornamentation with which they are encrusted. So complex, 

 in fact, is the overlaid design that it is nearly impossible longer 

 to distinguish any of the features that we perceived in the staves 

 held by the Weeping God of Tiahuanaco. Some may be able to 

 discover in the formalized faces at the base of the two staves 

 a faint echo of the bird-heads that are found at the bottoms of 

 the Tiahuanaco staves. 



So much, then, for the lower half of the design on the Chavin 

 stone. In order properly to study the upper half it will be neces- 

 sary to reverse the Plate. On doing so we find three grotesque 

 faces proceeding from one another's mouths and each with its 

 tongue protruding and highly decorated. These faces all have 

 fangs, but otherwise they are unlike one another, although the 

 last two from the center do resemble each other closely. The 

 nose of the first face is adorned with a combination of the 

 feather-motif, fang-motif and serpent-head motif. The noses of 

 the other two are much simpler and are marked only by an odd 

 but simple comb-like figure. On each side of the central band 

 of decoration formed by those three faces is a fringe of alternated 



