Cupisnique

Cupisnique was a pre-Columbian culture which flourished from ca. 1500 to 500 BC along what is now Peru's northern Pacific Coast. The culture had a distinctive style of adobe clay architecture but shared artistic styles and religious symbols with the later Chavin culture which arose in the same area at a later date.

The relationship between Chavin and Cupisnique is not well understood, and the names are sometimes used interchangeably. For instance, the scholar Alana Cordy-Collins treats as Cupisnique a culture lasting from 1000 – 200 BC, which are the dates some associate with the Chavin culture. Izumi Shimada calls Cupisnique a possible ancestor of Mochica (Moche) culture with no mention of Chavin. Anna C. Roosevelt refers to "the coastal manifestation of the Chavin Horizon ...dominated by the Cupisnique style".

A Cupisnique adobe temple was discovered in 2008 in the Lambayeque valley in the area of the archaeological site of Ventarron. The newly discovered temple is very close to the Ventarron temple; this adjacent location is known as “Collud”.

This temple sheds some light on the connection between the Cupisnique and the Chavin because of shared iconography. In fact, some other related temples have also been discovered in the area recently.

The Chavin people who came after the Cupisnique built a temple adjacent to Collud about three hundred years later; this location is named "Zarpan".

All three temples are close together, and form a single archaeological site. There are also many shared elements between all three locations. For example, one common element is that of the Spider Creator god with his net. This motif appears to persevere from the 4,000-year-old temple of Ventarrón all the way to the Moche culture.

The temple found in 2008 also includes imagery of the "spider god", thought to be associated with rainfall, hunting and warfare. The spider god image combines a spider's neck and head, with the mouth of a large cat and the beak of a bird. The only decapitator creature that by nature decapitates its victims heads is the spider.

According to the team leader Walter Alva,

"Cupisnique and Chavin shared the same gods and the same architectural and artistic forms, showing intense religious interaction among the cultures of the Early Formative Period from the north coast to the Andes and down to the central Andes."

The reason the Moche and the Cupisnique are sometimes referred to interchangeably is due to their similarities in ceramic designs. The Moche were the most “vibrant” in incorporating the cupisnique society of the emerging cultures that had a base population of farming and fishing along with a middle and elite class.

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