Story Mode
Here the walls become a school of symbols. Fish run north and south, birds cut across the plaster like prayers, and children are taught that iconography is not decoration: it is memory in public.
Chan Chan 03: Marine Iconography as Civic Knowledge
Ancient Peru Research
Chan Chan is globally known for relief programs featuring fish, birds, wave forms, and geometric motifs. Rather than reading these only as ornament, many researchers interpret them as part of a symbolic system tied to coast-based economy, social order, and ritual framing.
Metropolitan Museum scholarship on Chimú architectural models and palace imagery highlights the recurrence of these marine designs in elite contexts and links them to spaces of administration, storage, and audience. That gives your page a concrete interpretive bridge between art and governance.
For your site voice: call this "the code of the coast." It invites readers to see image-making as infrastructure, not afterthought.
Research Sources
Next Quest Prompt: Next quest: connect this iconography page to a textile page and a music page to compare visual, woven, and sonic memory systems.
Context and references
Use this page for cultural and geographic learning paths around the artwork.
