(Please read from the start)
“Religion and ideology
Cahuachi's primary application as a ceremonial center actually still leaves a lot to be discovered about the specifics of its religion and ideology. Cahuachi itself has mainly temples of varying sizes as its main architecture, where various religious practices and rituals took place, and was also used as a place to bury the dead and is surrounded by cemeteries. Cahuachi was obviously geographically sacred to the Nasca 3 people, it is just that it is unknown exactly why that is. Some things can be inferred upon, however, as in the case of the Room of the Posts, one of the most well-known constructions at Cahuachi. The room is characterized by well-made adobe walls that even happened to be painted with images pertaining to ceremonial uses such as Nasca panpipes, and rayed faces (Silverman 1988: 417). The fact that the walls were painted at all is significant in itself because, except for the endless amount of painted pottery at the site, there is not much for examples of other mediums of painting there. The Room of the Posts contained niches and circular depressions filled with offertory goods like caches and pottery filled with corn, spondylus shells, or huarango pods, as well as such items as blue-painted ají peppers, gourd rattles, portable looms, and painted fineware.
Finally, inside the room there are huarango positioned upright all over the room. Some are aligned in certain directions, all of different heights, one group has three rows of three all standing together near the western wall, one is even carved into a face playing a flute. Besides the architectural features, there is not much to learn just from the presence of the posts, but the cultural features associated with the huarango plant in the Río Grande de Nazca region is significant. The huarango plant is native to and grown in this region and has symbolic ancestral meaning, associated with the tree of life and one's roots, still held to this day. By looking at cultural beliefs in this area today, some interpreters have inferred that the room had ancestral and genealogical significance. As far as altars go, in the center of the room is a very low, clay square platform, and in the middle of which is a round depression. Textile production was one of the few craft specializations that went on at Cahuachi on a regular basis. These fancy textile remains were most likely used as Nasca funerary shrouds or for presumably elite/priestly attire.
Highly stylized painted pottery was found throughout Cahuachi, and had the most religious significance when found in association with burials and offertory remains inside of them. Other remains that held religious purposes at Cahuachi were animal remains. Llama remains, bird plumage used as decoration for headdresses or the like, and guinea pig remains with broken necks and evidence of being sacrificed with their undersides slit open, were evidence of sacrificial rituals that are reminiscent of divination practices, still practiced by some today. Besides the altar in the Room of the Posts as described above, there were circular depressions and niches in the floors and walls of many of the other structures built. All of them contain or contained offertory items, mainly containers or caches of maize, spondylus shell, huarango pods, and blue-painted ají peppers. Other subsurface storage jars found without food in them can be used as evidence of communal feasting. There is little to no evidence of a prominent use of writing at Cahuachi.
There is some very specific iconography going on there, though, that portray masked ritual performers or priests, mythical beings, and ceremonial rites that honor agricultural fertility, as well as going so far as to confirm that farmers even participated in these celebrations as well. Finally, trophy head taking was an important aspect of the Nasca cult, which are displayed on early Nasca pottery where costumed figures hold decapitated human heads.”
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