imagery from the Chavín site (in the Peruvian Andes):
"Crested eagles curl in on themselves, vanishing into a maze of ornament"
"jaguars, snakes, caimans [...] slip back from our field of vision, winding in and out of each other's bodies or merging into complex patterns"
see Carlo Severi's 2015 analysis of the "chimera principle" (The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination, for which Graeber wrote the foreword)
"Some of these images are described by scholars as 'monsters,' but they have nothing in common with the simple composite figures of ancient Greek vases or Mesopotamian sculpture [...] We are in another kind of visual universe altogther. It is the realm of the shape-shifter, where no body is ever quite stable or complete, and diligent mental training is required to tease out structure from what at first seems to be visual mayhem"
an argument can be made that these images "are not meant to illustrate or represent, but instead serve as visual cues for extraordinary feats of memory" (388)
389: "we actually can be on fairly safe ground in assuming that these images were records of shamanic journeys"