(Also Pucara ware)
Pukara pottery comes from the city of Pukara located 75 kilometers northwest of Lake Titicaca in Peru. The city was a cultural and political center during the Early Intermediate period. It was fortified with walls on three sides of the city. It has been radiocarbon dated between 250 BC and AD 100. Pukara pottery was elaborate and colorful. It was made of a mica paste. Termed polychromatic, the pottery was often brightly colored with red, black, and cream or yellow. An identifying feature of Pukara pottery is that the regions of different colors were incised around their borders. These colors were painted on before the piece was fired. Each piece was then polished to a fine finish.
The designs on the pieces include felines, condors, humans, fish, frogs, and geometrical figures such as stepped lines. The eyes of the animals had a vertical line through them. Some designs were in relief or low relief. The felines were often shown with their bodies in profile but with their face forward. There was sometimes a ring balanced on the nose of these animals. The humans and other animals were usually heads in profile.
The Pukara style has been seen spread to other cultures, such as Tiwanaku (or Tihuanaco). Some of the similarities include the vertical lines in the animal eyes and the ring on the cat's nose. Pukara is believed to pre-date Tiwanaku. Almost all of the recovered artifacts are broken or just shards, but some of the pieces may have been flat-bottomed bowls with flared sides, cup-shaped pieces, cone-shaped pieces, and rectangular jars. The Pukara pottery style also produced decorated ceramic trumpets. There is one whole artifact in the Rafael Larco Herrera Museum in Lima, and two broken ones in the National Museum of Peru. No other complete items have been recovered.
Bushnell, G.H.S. Peru. Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1957.
Hoyle, Rafael Larco. Peru. World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York, 1966
Moseley, Michael E. The Incas And Their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru. Thames and Hudson, New York, 1992.
Peruvian Prehistory. Ed. Richard W. Keatinge. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988.
Written by: Erin Potter