The feminine image: the anthropomorphic figurine at the Cerro El Plomo capacocha site

Abstract

The Cerro El Plomo capacocha ceremony occurred at the top of a sacred peak, or Apu, situated in the Mapocho Valley, where Santiago de Chile is now located. Archaeologists believe that such an important Inca ritual was not only of a political-religious nature within the conquest of conquered valleys, but that it also functioned as a mechanism of symbolic efficacy, and as a means of achieving the ideological introduction and assimilation of the local ethnic groups that had occupied the valley before the arrival of the Incas.

The use of anthropomorphic figurines as part of the ritual, like the one found in 1954 in the context of an invasion of an archaeological site by tomb robbers, highlights the standardization of symbolic material within the Inca state, as well as the distinctive identity components apparent in the design of textiles. In light of these factors, a semiotic analysis is required, based upon interpretation of the Inca foundation myth as a political and social strategy, as well as that same myth’s symbolic spatial components.