Chavín Iconography and the Early Horizon

Chavín's most important image, El Lanzón, or the "Gran Imagen," is a granite monolith about 4.5 meters tall depicting an anthropomorphic supernatural being with feline fangs, a head of serpents, and the claws of a bird of prey, combining jaguar, serpent, and avian attributes within a single composite deity. The Estela Raimondi, a granite slab nearly 2 meters tall discovered by the Italian naturalist Antonio Raimondi in the nineteenth century, depicts a frontal "Staff God" holding two staffs, an image legible both right-side up and inverted that would reappear centuries later on the Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku. The Obelisco Tello, a granite monolith more than 2.5 meters tall carved on all four faces, depicts two intertwined caimans surrounded by plant motifs — yuca, achira, chili pepper, squash — interpreted as a representation of agricultural fertility. Chavín artists achieved these effects through distinctive techniques of "contour rivalry" and "kennings," in which one body part stands symbolically for another, formally analyzed by John Rowe in 1962; direct evidence for the ritual use of psychoactive substances, including the San Pedro cactus and snuff tubes possibly linked to vilca seeds, supports a shamanic interpretation of Chavín religious practice advanced especially by Richard Burger.