Pottery colours tell a lot about power of empires: Study

"People sometimes think of the Inka as the first big empire in South America, but the Wari came first," says Luis Muro Ynonan, the study's corresponding author and a research associate and former postdoctoral scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago."Since they didn't use writing, material culture -- things like pottery -- would have been an important means for conveying social and political messages," says Muro Ynonan."I remember seeing some of these Wari-influenced pots as an undergraduate archaeology student in Peru, they're fascinating," says Muro Ynonan." Muro Ynonan finally got to pursue his interest in pigment in-depth during his postdoctoral position at the Field Museum.

"Some of the sites, specifically in northern Peru, used a different recipe for black, using iron- and calcium-rich minerals before the Wari arrived, but after the Wari took over, they switched to the manganese-based recipes," says Muro Ynonan."In general, black minerals are relatively easy to obtain from the valleys we looked at," says Muro Ynonan.