In this week’s episode – Episode 6 – Sicán Death Mask, Ancestor Worship, and Another Kick Ass Queen – Ashley’s Piece of Stuff was a beautiful funerary mask from the Sicán culture that inhabited the north coast of Peru from around 750 to 1375 CE. They are sometimes called the Lambayeque culture after that region of Peru. It turns out that people in North America may actually be more familiar with the Sicán than they realize because a lot of Sicán gold in museums has been mislabeled as Incan – when in reality the Spaniards melted down most of the Incan gold they found, while the Sicán gold was safe from them. This reprieve was only temporary and Sicán tombs have been systematically looted well into the twentieth century.
The topic of ear gauges came up when we were looking at the large circles at the bottom of the ears on the mask. I was pretty sure that this area of the world had an ancient practice of wearing ear spools. After a little investigation it turned out that the Sicán elite did indeed practice stretching large holes in their ear lobes. It is not just the masks that provide evidence of this practice, the ear spools themselves have survived in many examples.
In a Middle Sicán tomb known as Huaca Loro East Tomb, there were five people buried, one robust adult male of 40 to 50 years old, two adult females and two juveniles. The male was the star of the show in this tomb, and he has come to known as the Sicán Lord. There were some 1.2 tons of grave goods, two-thirds of which by weight were gold, copper, and tumbaga which is an alloy of mostly gold and copper. The man was buried in the seated position that seems to have reserved for nobility, but he was placed in upside-down and decapitated, his head positioned nearby facing west. This arrangement reflects not only his exalted position in life, but also in death, when the Sicán lord became the embodiment of the Sicán deity. The inverted posture may represent rebirth as this deity and the two women in this tomb were arranged so that one has her legs splayed as if giving birth and the other positioned as if to catch the baby.
The adult male was the only one of the five to be buried with head ornaments. He wore a nose clip, ear spools and two other sets of ear ornaments and a large mask – all in gold, and he was accompanied by six more sets of gold ear spools. Unfortunately, when I was googling to try and find a picture of more details about “Sicán ear spools” I was horrified to see that the first twenty or so hits were not from museums or scholarly websites, but from auction sites. It seems that a pair of Sicán ear spools go for anything between six and twelve thousand dollars. This is really disheartening; each pair of these ear spools probably represents another grave robbed and an archaeological context unavailable for study. We commented during the podcast that this culture is not very well known, and even more knowledge is lost when tombs are just mined for what can turn a quick profit.
The Sicán made mounds, platforms, and pyramids out of adobe brick and these were the burial sites of the Sicán elite. The land that these tombs were on came to be owned by wealthy families, who had the legal right to anything that was dug up on their land. One such site was Batán Grand which was owned by the Aurich family. Once they discovered that there was so much gold in these mounds, they set about basically systematically mining it using their agricultural workers to dig it up. This continued well into the twentieth century when the Aurich family started to use bulldozers. The context was completely lost. In the 1970s government land reform in Peru took this land away from wealthy families like the Aurichs and gave it to collectives. Fortunately, this meant that this systematic, industrial scale, looting stopped and finally some scientific archaeology could take place, like the recovery of the Sicán Lord mentioned above.
On the topic of ear spools, it may be easier to ask where in the world ear gauging did not happen, certainly there is evidence on every continent (except Antarctica). The ears on Tutankhamun’s fabulous gold mask have large ear gauged holes. Buddha’s ears are always shown elongated because earlier in his life when he was a prince, he had worn heavy jewelry which he abandoned in his ascetic search for enlightenment. The practice also seems to be very old, Ötzi the Ice Man, an ice mummy discovered in the Ötzal Alps in 1991, is 5,300-years-old, and guess what, he had ear holes that had been stretched to 7 to 10 millimeters. Ötzi also had tattoos and other piercings so perhaps he can be seen as the original Emo kid. He also had in his possession a very fine copper axe, not a common item at all, and so this and the ear holes may indicate his status.
Ear stretching, therefore, was a truly ancient as well as widespread practice, and it likely carried with it a variety of meanings wherever and when ever it was practiced. One of these meanings may have been as a sign of elite status; this body modification took time and resources, and it was a permanent marker that set those with large ear holes apart – as well as providing a place to display even more bling. King Tut, Buddha as a prince, Ötzi the ice man, and the Sicán Lord – thousands of miles and thousands of years apart – all shared this marker of stretched holes in their ears.
Izumi Shimada, “Who were the Sicán? Their Development, Characteristics, and Legacy,” English text of the Introductory chapter of the 2009 Exhibition catalogue, The Golden Capital of Sicán, edited by Izumi Shimada, Kerichi Shinoda, and Masahiro Ono, Tokyo Broadcasting System, Tokyo, 2009. It was published in Japanese – English language version accessed August 1, 2023, at Academia.com https://www.academia.edu/347180/Who_were_the_Sic%C3%A1n_Their_Development_Characteristics_and_Legacies
Sarahn Scher and Beth Harris, “What the Bulldozers Left behind: Reclaiming Sicán’s Past,” Smarthistory accessed August 1, 2023 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1LinuzLQVk
Stretching (Body Piercing), Wikipedia accessed August 1, 2023 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretching_(body_piercing)