BY WENDY SODERBURG
UCLA Today Staff
Archaeology, it seems, has always been in his blood.
As a 7-year-old boy, Christopher
Donnan collected all the Indian artifacts he could find
— arrowheads, pipes, ax heads and beads. He kept
this collection all through high school and still has
some of it, although most of the items are now in the
hands of his nephews and nieces.
“It was a passion
for me,” said Donnan, professor of anthropology
and director emeritus of the Fowler Museum of Cultural
History. His parents, however, encouraged him to get into
a more practical line of work, and as a freshman at UC
Berkeley, Donnan enrolled in architectural engineering.
He changed his mind after taking a couple of courses in
anthropology. “I knew anthropology was what I wanted,”
he said. “My parents were concerned, but supportive.”
Of course, if they knew
that their son would become one of the world’s foremost
experts on ancient Andean society and culture, they wouldn’t
have worried. Donnan went on to receive his master’s
degree in anthropology at UCLA and his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley.
After graduating in 1968,
Donnan joined the faculty in the Department of Anthropology
at UCLA and began developing a program in Andean archaeology.
His primary research has focused on the Moche, a civilization
that flourished on the desert-like coast of northern Peru
between 100 A.D. and 800 A.D.
When he delivers the 94th
Faculty Research Lecture on April 3, Donnan will talk
about his lifelong devotion to Moche research and how
he created an archive of more than 160,000 photographs
of Moche art from museums and private collections all
over the world. The lecture will take place at 3 p.m.
in Schoenberg Hall and bears the same title as his next
book, “Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru,”
which will be published in November.
The “portraits”
are actually ceramic containers that are intricately sculpted
with the countenances of Moche people. Donnan started
photographing these vessels when he was a graduate student,
and his photographic archive now includes more than 900
portraits.
“With such a large
sample, we began to see multiple portraits of the same
individuals,” Donnan explained. “We also found
fully modeled figures with the same face as the figure
on a portrait, and thus began to reconstruct who that
individual was and what activities he participated in.”
Donnan, who travels to
Peru annually to do archaeology, chuckled when he recalled
his very first excavation in that country as a UCLA graduate
student.
“We lived in a building
that didn’t have a roof. It had a dirt floor,”
he said. “There was no running water and no electricity.
Looking back on it, I know of no other graduate student
who lived under such conditions.
“But I was so grateful
for the opportunity, I didn’t consider it a hardship,”
he added. “We were living in very primitive conditions,
but it was wonderful. It was the chance of a lifetime.”
