Question

Text 1

Historians studying pre-Inca Peru have looked to ceramic vessels to understand daily life among the Moche people. These mold-made sculptures present plants, animals, and human faces in precise ways—vessels representing human faces are so detailed that scholars have interpreted facial markings to represent scars and other skin irregularities. Some historians have even used these objects to identify potential skin diseases that may have afflicted people at the time.

Text 2

Art historian and archaeologist Lisa Trever has argued that the interpretation of Moche "portrait" vessels as hyper-realistic portrayals of identifiable people may inadvertently disregard the creativity of the objects' creators. Moche ceramic vessels, Trever argues, are artworks in which sculptors could free their imagination, using realistic objects and people around them as inspiration to explore more abstract concepts.

Based on the texts, what would Lisa Trever (Text 2) most likely say about the interpretation presented in the underlined portion of Text 1?
A. Markings on depictions of human faces are not necessarily intended to portray particular details about the physical appearance of individuals.
B. Some vessels may have been damaged during their excavation and thus provide little insight into Moche culture.
C. Depictions of human faces are significantly more realistic than depictions of plants and other animals are.
D. It is likely that some depictions of human faces with extensive markings are intended to portray the same historical individual.

Answer 1

Lisa Trever would likely argue that the detailed facial markings on Moche ceramics represent artistic creativity rather than specific, realistic depictions of individuals.

Step-by-step explanation:

Based on the perspective presented by Lisa Trever in Text 2, she would most likely argue that markings on depictions of human faces are not strictly intended to be true-to-life representations of individual people.

Rather than interpreting these as specific indicators of physical attributes such as skin diseases or scars, Trever would suggest that they might reflect the Moche artists' creativity, as they used realistic inspiration to explore more abstract concepts. This aligns with the understanding that Moche ceramics, including their distinctive stirrup spout vessels, often involved a blend of realism and artistic imagination, as opposed to being mere documentary evidence of individuals or their conditions.