Chapter summaries Unquiet Women: From the Dusk of the Roman Empire to the Dawn of the Enlightenment Max Adams

Summary and Analysis of Chapter 13: La Señora de Cao

[Spoiler Warning: This summary and analysis reveals details from the chapter.]

Summary

Max Adams shifts the focus from early medieval Europe to the Mochica culture of coastal Peru, roughly contemporary with the West Stow settlement. The chapter centers on the 2005 archaeological discovery of La Señora de Cao at the Huaca Cao Viejo ceremonial complex. This young woman, buried under a massive adobe tomb, was encased in twenty layers of textiles and precious metal objects, including crowns, war clubs, and a necklace. Her preserved skin revealed elaborate tattoos of snakes and spiders, symbols associated with divination and blood rituals in Moche iconography. The grave also contained evidence of human sacrifice and a ceramic vessel depicting a female healer. The chapter argues that La Señora was a high-status shaman, healer, or possibly a supreme ruler. Adams uses her burial to illuminate the animistic Andean worldview, where female sexuality and healing were revered, and women’s mastery of the backstrap loom represented a living link to ancestral culture and cosmic continuity.

Key Events

  • Discovery at Huaca Cao Viejo: Archaeologists unearth the mummified body of a Mochica woman at a pyramid complex overlooking the Pacific, a site adorned with murals of prisoners and shamanic figures.
  • Excavating the tomb: The team removes an adobe cap and an owl-faced ceramic vessel, revealing a cane mat, a log raft, and a massive multi-layered textile mummy bundle.
  • Uncovering grave companions: Alongside the primary burial, archaeologists find ceramic vessels and the body of a second female who had been strangled as a sacrifice.
  • Revealing La Señora’s identity: Analysis of the body shows a woman in her twenties who had borne a child; her skin bears tattoos of zigzag snakes and spiders in rare blue ink.
  • Cataloguing burial wealth: The unwrapping of twenty textile layers exposes metal war clubs, gold crowns, nose rings, gold plaques sewn onto a shroud, and a bundle of dart throwers.

Character Development

  • La Señora de Cao: An unnamed Mochica woman in her twenties, standing under 1.5 meters tall and having borne at least one child. Her identity is constructed entirely from her grave goods and body art rather than written records. The chapter presents her not as a passive elite figure but as an active agent of power, possibly a supreme ruler or an exalted shaman-healer. Her tattoos—serpents and spiders—physically inscribe her body with symbols of divination, marking her as a specialist in what the text calls “the taking of blood” and communication with cosmic forces.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

  • The Healer and the Sacrificed: The burial juxtaposes a ceramic vessel showing a female healer tending to a sick child with the strangled body of an attendant. Adams frames this apparent contradiction as integral to a cyclic cosmos where giving and taking life are “spokes of the same wheel.”
  • Cosmic Tattoos and Divination: The blue-ink snakes and spiders on La Señora’s arms are not decorative. They function as a permanent visual lexicon linking her directly to Moche concepts of shamanic insight and ritual power.
  • Weaving as Cultural Continuity: The backstrap loom depicted in Moche art and used to create the twenty-layer burial shroud is presented as a symbol of women’s technical brilliance and social solidarity. This craft links ancient priestesses to living Andean women today.
  • Pyramid as Cosmic Axis: The Huaca Cao Viejo, with its mural imagery of decapitated heads and supernatural beasts, is portrayed as a point of contact with non-human forces, a stage for the intermediaries buried within it.

Why This Chapter Matters

This chapter serves as a hemispheric counterpoint to the book’s European narrative. By examining La Señora de Cao’s burial a millennium before Christian contact, Adams demonstrates that women’s ritual authority, artistic production, and political power were central to complex societies beyond the Western canon. The chapter challenges any simplistic narrative of historical progress by showing a culture where female healing skills and cosmic power were openly celebrated and materially spectacular. It insists that the past of “unquiet women” is global and demands decoding through archaeology and material culture when written records are absent or were never created.

Study Questions and Answers

  1. How does the burial context of La Señora de Cao support the claim that she was a high-status shaman or healer rather than merely an elite consort? The direct evidence includes her tattoos of snakes and spiders, which Moche iconography associates with divination skill. Her grave goods include a ceramic stirrup cup depicting a female healer and a bundle of dart throwers, items linked to ritual specialists. These symbols, combined with the monumental tomb and gold crowns, suggest her power was rooted in initiated ritual knowledge and healing practice rather than simply inherited rank.

  2. What does the inclusion of a strangled female attendant in the grave suggest about Mochica beliefs, and how does Adams contextualize this act? The attendant’s presence suggests a practice of human sacrifice intended to accompany a high-status individual into the afterlife. Adams contextualizes this within the cyclic Andean worldview, where life and death were not absolute opposites but part of a recurring continuum. He notes that modern sensibilities find the juxtaposition of a healing-themed vessel and a sacrificed body incompatible, but for the Moche, both acts could be necessary interventions in the same cosmic balance.

  3. In what way does the evidence of backstrap loom weaving function as a link between La Señora de Cao and contemporary Andean women? The chapter highlights that the superb textiles wrapping La Señora’s body were created on a backstrap loom, a technology depicted on Moche ceramics that is still a vital part of domestic equipment for Andean women. This unbroken technical tradition serves as a living connection to ancestral lineage, expressing maternal solidarity and cultural inheritance across more than a millennium.

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