About

This project investigates the musical practices of the Moche, a culture that thrived from 100-800 AD on the north coast of Peru. From a theoretical standpoint, I wish to understand a bit more about the interaction between the ephemeral and the durable, between music and the materials that produce it, and the relationships it creates and the networks of interaction and alliance it inhabits. This is still very much a work in progress and my thinking about these problems changes on a daily basis.

Practically speaking, this project directly utilizes the material archaeological remains of music: musical instruments, depictions of music in art (iconography), and constructed architectural performance spaces in order to to investigate the role of music in the lives of the Moche.

This project has two distinct phases. Phase I is the investigation of extant musical instruments and iconography in museum and archaeological excavation collections. At the moment, I am working primarily with the collection at the Museo Larco, in Lima and secondarily with the collection from the San Jose de Moro Archaeological Project at Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP).

Phase II will involve the acoustic survey and mapping of various performances spaces at Moche archaeological sites on the north coast of Peru including Cerro Chepan; San Ildelfonso; Huaca de la Luna; and Huaca El Brujo.

This project is funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. This project would also not have begun without the support of Prof. Terence D’Altroy of Columbia University and Prof. Luis Jaime Castillo of PUCP.

About Me:

My name is Dianne Scullin and I am a Ph.D candidate from the department of anthropology at Columbia University. I am currently working on the first portion of  my Ph.D project. I have been based in Peru since November 2010 and will return to the USA at the beginning of September 2011. I attended New York University where I received my B.A. Magna Cum Laude in Anthropology in 2006. I then attended the University of Cambridge, UK and completed an M.Phil in Archaeology in August 2007 with the thesis entitled “The Use of Molds for Ceramic Production on the North Coast of Peru: Revealing Agency and Political Power within the Moche Fineware Manufacturing Process.”

I began my Ph.D at Columbia University in September 2008. I have assisted a variety of archaeological projects in my short career to date. My first experience was a survey and mapping project of a slave cemetery in the Delaware Water Gap National Reserve, Pennsylvania, USA. I then came to Peru and dug with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill fieldschool in the Moche Valley of Peru. I have excavated  a Roman farmhouse/villa outside of Lucca in Italy and worked as a contract archaeologist for six months in the United Kingdom on a variety of projects and for a variety of CRM companies. Recently I have worked for the San Jose de Moro Archaeological Project during the summers of 2009 and 2010. I have also worked with a fellow Ph.D student at Columbia University on her project outside of Taos, New Mexico, USA during the summer of 2010.

My academic interests include philosophy, archaeological theory, archaeological methods, music archaeology, ethnomusicology, and of course the archaeology of Peru. I am an avid musician myself, having played the trombone in a variety of ensembles for the last 18 years, and I completed a minor in music at New York University.

Feel free to contact me with any comments or questions at dms951@gmail.com or if you are a wordpress user, simply leave a comment here!

Moche Music Project by Dianne Scullin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.