Home   >   Front Page   >   Featured Articles   >   Beauty and the Bestiary

Beauty and the Bestiary

By Geoff McCafferty

One of the sad realities of our culture is the “woman behind the man” mentality – far too often hubby gets the credit for what was essentially a team effort. This has certainly been the case in my own academic career, in which the collaboration I’ve enjoyed with my lovely wife Sharisse has often been overshadowed with her not receiving deserved credit, even when she is listed as co-author and sometimes even first author of scholarly articles. Over 35+ years we have developed a symbiotic research style, where she does much of the background research and then hands it over to me to”add the B.S.” required for an academic presentation. Over the years we have collaborated on more than 50 publications, which has definitely enhanced my C.V. but has done little for her own professional resume as a public school speech therapist. Until her retirement Sharisse’s cohort had little knowledge of her ‘secret identity’ as a globe-trotting archaeologist.

Working in Mi Museo in Granada over the past few years, Sharisse has made some remarkable discoveries. She has a keen eye for pre-Columbian iconography and has been able to recognize symbols that have been mis-interpreted for over 100 years by noted archaeologists such as Samuel Lothrop. Her identification of praying mantis’ on Luna Polychrome, for example, will soon be published in a major journal of Latin American art history (and yes, I added the B.S.). More recently sh/we recognized that the central figure on the so-called Pataky “Jaguar pots” in fact represented badgers, and may relate to a 1000 year old version of the Cadejo myth (the cadejo is a terrifying beast who stalks drunks and philanderers while wearing a clanking collar). This is fun stuff, and offers novel insights into ancient Nicaraguan culture.

Having worked on Nicaraguan imagery now for more than 20 years, Sharisse is currently working on a major synthesis using decorated ceramics from the 7000 piece Mi Museo collection to create a bestiary of the pre-Columbian world. Based on limited historical accounts, archaeo-historians understand very little about past belief systems. Yet indigenous artists recorded animistic beliefs on their material culture, including the beautifully decorated pottery for which Pacific Nicaragua is famous. Why pottery was decorated is an interesting dilemma, but scholars have speculated that they may relate to shamanistic experience connected to supernatural forces.

By developing an inventory of animal imagery, Sharisse is hoping to tease out some of the animistic forces that were so important to native cultures. For example, the praying mantis, known as the ‘madre culebra’ by traditional elders, was used for divination but also had a symbolic relationship with ritual head-hunting. Others believed that a powerful shaman could transform into crocodilian forms. But the Nicaraguan jungle teemed with plant and animal life, and animistic societies perceived spiritual power in all sorts of living and non-living phenomena. By creating a bestiary that attempts to identify the cultural ecology of indigenous Nicaragua, Sharisse is writing an important new chapter on the pre-Columbian past.

Sharisse at Mi Museo

Praying mantis image on Luna Polychrome

One Comment