The petroglyphs at Cochineros were best studied by Antonio Nuñez Jímenez, a Cuban adventurer and revolutionary. As Cultural Ambassador to Peru, from 1972 to 1978, he travelled the length of the country visiting and recording petroglyphs, and published the results in four volumes.
It is an awesome work, but has the flaws that might be expected when someone aims to do the impossible in half the time, whilst attending embassy dinners. The complete work was published in 1986, and we can imagine him working through a pile of notes, sketches and photographs which he had assembled over several years, transported back to Cuba in bundles, and finally laid out to compile into the first ever record of Peruvian engraved rock art.
Petroglifos del Perú records the stones of Cochineros with 36 pages of drawings and photographs on stones numbered up to twelve. There is some confusion in the numbering of rocks, and some important panels are missed, but what Nuñez does give us is almost entirely accurate, and includes important details – a scale and an indication of the panel for many images, the relative position of some stones, and most of all an unbiased method of recording the images which he appears to have applied consistently across the country.
Other researchers visiting the site have attempted to catalogue the images or map the position of the stones, but have been defeated by the scale of the task. Nuñez’ twelve stones became fourteen and eighteen, but what is more interesting is the complexity, the depth of the site.
To call the substrates of the drawings either rocks or boulders is misleading. The first stone seen from the south is ten metres long and three metres wide at the top. It is possible to walk onto the upper surface, with care, since it drops to the river bed four metres below. The surface area which has been used for drawing, the canvas, has an area of about forty square metres. It is the size of a small house, whose walls and roof have been covered with images. Other stones are the size of a car or a minibus.
Some of these giant canvases have been used to develop equally large themes. There are lines of dots that run for several metres, individual images half a metre high, and tableaus of thematically related images covering panels of several square metres.
The site is data rich. Looking down on the corner of one rock (above) we can see three human figures, three llamas, three shawl pins, the dated heart, several trails of dots, two lobster creatures, two condors, a llama caravan, a circle with a centre, a star, and twenty more individual identifiable images for which we have no name, in Spanish or English. We can surely imagine that the creators could name what they drew, but it is beyond our easy comprehension.
Walking through the orchard from one giant boulder to the next, each more amazing than the last, I can see there are a handful of images – spirals, llamas, wavy lines, concentric circles – repeated on several rocks, and hundreds more that seem to be unique. The most common icons, the more than eighty llamas, or the hundred tumis, have been drawn by many hands and in different styles. There are some commonalities – a particular human figure has been drawn four times on different rock panels, two lines of llamas appear to be by the same artist – but they are the exception. It is as if the rock panels have been used as blackboards by whole classes full of students, time and again, without an eraser.
It is obvious is that there are images of different brightnesses. In many places, drawings can be seen to have been created on top of an earlier drawing, and the upper image is brighter.
There is a time sequence, with the rocks being used a a drawing board repeatedly, and figures being drawn over older figures. The age and the brightness of the image appear to be related on many panels, though not on all. I began to wonder whether it would be possible to differentiate between the brighter and darker images, the newer and older.
Different rock faces may have different themes. The skyward pointing surfaces are often most decorated. Perhaps the first artists chose the best panels – the darkest rock, the highest points. Perhaps those facing the river, or facing the hillside, had different audiences, human or godly.
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So he contented himself with pointing out the large number of knife-like images, and proposing that they related to a period of violence when the Inca came to the coast.
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They could be. If you look at the spiral, now we are seeing a big difference. The brightness once touches 170, but averages maybe 155. This is definitely something we could measure.
To be sure we would want to take a more controlled image – at a fixed angle to the rock, perhaps with a bright sun rather than uniform sky illumination. Or maybe with flash at a particular angle, to correct for any change of illumination across the stone.
And there are other measurements we can use – the median, the peak, the standard deviation of the image brightness within the selected area. We may get better differentiation by looking at some or several or those variables.
These dark panels of the rocks, facing south, have very clear images, but those on the upper surfaces are much more difficult to see. Is that because they are older?
There are some tupus on other rocks, facing the sky, that are very faint. There are a pair on the Rock of the Llamas, next two two monkeys climbing a tree, that are only just visible.
We can correlate the heart with older and younger drawings on Piedra 11, and we have two different angles on the stone, so we can see if there is consistency between photographs, where the angle of the camera and the sun may change.
Lets take a look at the Paria Caca stone as recorded on image 215. Here we have Juan´s heart, the track of dots leading up to the mountain, three tupus, shawl pins, which have similar brightness, and a very faint llama which the tupus have been drawn over. The heart is estimated to be 40 years old, the line of dots, which suggests a pilgrimage to Pariacaca with llama sacrifices on route, would be the most recent historic drawing at 450-500 years old, the tupus, which seems slightly less bright, would be a similar age and the age of the faint but beautiful llama in the background is our unknown.
The rectangle is chosen so that a substantial part of it is entirely the chosen image from top to bottom, and this is from where the peak reading is taken.
By taking the peak intensity of the image on a profile plot we get much more precise values, averaged from several measurements on each image. The heart (213) is brightest, followed by the dot track (202), tupus (198) and the old llama (161). These are consistent to +/- 3 %.There difference between the tumis is not significant, nor perhaps between the tumus and the dot track. To the eye, there is a suspicion that the third tupu is brighter, and the measurements support that, though it is within the range of experimental error.
If we assume an age of thirty years for the heart, and five hundred years for the dot track and tupus, and postulate a linear relationship between age and brightness, we get an age of 1450 to 2200 BP years for the old llama. If we look at the error range of the heart brightness, we get dates from 1250 to 2600 BP.
There is of course no reason to postulate a linear relationship. But that age is not unreasonable according to previous hypotheses – it would put some figures at Cochineros contemporary with others at nearby Petroglyph sites of the central coast such as Checta and Huancor. It would be a big departure though for some archaeologists who have suggested that the majority of the markings are Inca, barely five hundred years old, or Late Intermediate, 500 to 1000 years old.
Go forward to 5 Rock Art in Peru
Go forward to 8 – Llama trains past La Capilla…
Go backward to 02 The Stones and the Images
Go backward to 4 – More Questions than answers