Mural E from the site of Pañamarca, located in northern Peru's Nepeña Valley, is frequently reproduced in studies of Moche iconography. This is due in part to the relationship between a female figure featured in the mural lifting a goblet and Christopher Donnan's thematic approach to Moche iconography, a methodology that has dominated the field since it was developed in the 1970s. Donnan cited the mural in his identification of the character as an important component of a central and oft-repeated subject in the Moche corpus, which he named the Presentation Theme (Journal of Latin American Lore 1(2):147–162). Despite the importance of Mural E to the history of Moche studies, The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru, is the first publication of significant length dedicated to the archaeological site at which it was found. Written by Lisa Trever with contributions by Jorge Gamboa, Ricardo Toribio, and Ricardo Morales, the book is an extraordinarily thorough accounting of the history of archaeological investigation at Pañamarca and the exciting new discoveries made by the Proyecto Arqueológico Pañamarca–Área Monumental (PAPAM).

The book is divided into two parts, Part 1: Out of the Archive, into the Field: A Modern History of Art and Archaeology at Pañamarca, and Part 2: Findings of the Pañamarca Documentary Field Project. The first section constitutes what Colin McEwan describes in his forward as a site biography (p. xi), a detailed history of archaeology at Pañamarca told primarily through the analysis of archaeological illustrations. The second section documents the results of the fieldwork performed by PAPAM. The wide range of material evidence presented throughout the book, from nineteenth-century photographs to stratigraphic profiles, reflects the interdisciplinary scope of the project that was created in association with Trever's dissertation research.

Among the earliest illustrations considered in the historiographic overview of Part 1 is an engraving of the site's monumental architecture included in American diplomat-turned-archaeologist Ephraim G. Squier's travel narrative, Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas (1877). An 1864 stereo pair taken by the British photographer Augustus Le Plongeon, who accompanied Squier on his trip to the site, served as the model for the image. Trever's excellent formal analysis of both the stereo pair and the engraving it inspired demonstrates not only the mutability of early archaeological illustrations in the face of translation from one medium to another, but also how the intended audience and the artists' backgrounds fundamentally shaped each reproduction. This point—that archaeological illustration is an inherently interpretive endeavor, simultaneously producing an image of an archaeological subject and a document of its own temporal and cultural context—is a major theme of the first half of the book, which focuses on how murals at Pañamarca were visually recorded at the time of their discovery.

Trever's painstaking research reveals how and when each of Pañamarca's known murals was brought to the attention of the archaeological community, as well how the discrepancies between the murals and the illustrations made after them reflect the circumstances of artistic production. Trever notes, for instance, that Toribio Mejía Xesspe's 1934 field drawing of Mural A depicts the composition's battling figures in colors that neither match Mejía's written description nor the mural itself, likely because he was equipped with a limited number of colored pencils. She determines that a representation of the same mural made by Pedro Azabache Bustamante 16 years later creates a false sense of clarity. Azabache elided evidence of damage to the supporting wall and smoothed the edges of lost areas. On the other hand, Trever believes that Félix Caycho Quispe's 1958–1959 illustration of the now mostly destroyed Mural E is close to accurate. Working from a tracing, Caycho produced a full-scale reproduction painted with carefully matched colors that he mixed on site. His precise rendering lives on most prolifically as the basis for several well-published reconstructions, the relationships among which Trever smartly mapped out for the reader like a genealogical chart (Figure 61).

The second half of the book is a summary of excavation results that despite being highly detailed is easily navigable. In addition to locating each of the site's known murals, Trever's team uncovered a number of previously unrecorded images. The majority of these murals were found in a newly documented structure that PAPAM named the Temple of the Painted Pillars. Dated to roughly AD 600–800, the space was modified five times and repainted eight times. Appendix 4, a diagram that charts the complicated painting sequence of the temple, is a helpful aid for understanding the rich array of images discovered there. Of particular interest is Painting 1 on the southwest face of Pillar 1, which is composed of three vertically stacked scenes. The central image shows a female figure lifting a goblet, a second connection between the Pañamarca murals and the Presentation Theme. As a conservation measure, every mural that was unearthed was reburied, making the extensive visual documentation included in this section a key contribution. The printing quality and paper finish selected for the book, however, reduces the legibility of some images, especially photographs without much color contrast such as those that predominately feature adobe architecture.

The data reviewed in Part 2 offer a wealth of important information about Pañamarca's murals. The content of the recently uncovered murals will support future iconographic research, and the observations made about the mural program as a whole provide new opportunities to enrich our understanding of Moche visual culture. Each scene in Pañamarca's murals, for instance, is delimited by a red band. Are these bands a visual device for directing the consumption of complex narrative images that has gone unrecognized until now? The perceived idiosyncrasies of the murals and the site's location at the southern edge of Moche territory also allow the paintings to serve as an effective counterpoint to better-known and earlier-dating murals from northern Moche sites. In fact, PAPAM produced the first absolute dates for any Moche context in the Nepeña Valley.

Though one might initially envision distinct audiences for Parts 1 and 2, both sections of The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru are a valuable resource for anyone interested in precolumbian murals or the Moche, regardless of disciplinary affiliation. A meticulously researched and well-formatted book, it achieves the project's stated goal of contextualizing Pañamarca's murals within the archaeology of the site and the tradition of Moche mural painting more broadly by employing both art historical and archaeological approaches in equal measure.