Art as an affecting presence: infant funerary urns in pre-Hispanic northwest Argentina

This article asks how art makes society, investigating the ways art objects were used by past peoples to shape and to give expression to emotions. Archaeology reveals a rich diversity of images and objects used by people as part of processions, performances, dances, or feasts. Reflecting enormous variation, art evoked wide-ranging sensory experiences, some of them powerfully affecting, transformative, and lasting in their impacts. Employing Armstrong's notion of the ‘affecting presence’, the author considers how archaeologists might reconstruct past emotions. A case study involving decorated burial urns from northwest Argentina during the Regional Developments Period, AD 950–1430, is explored in detail to consider the figured world of infant burial and mourning.