What I love about the societies of the Andes is that they developed completely independently
from the rest of the world. Choices they made about their economy about social relationships
about death are just done in a different way which is intriguing to understand. Welcome
to this Introduction to Peru: a journey in time, supported by Prom Peru I'm Jago Cooper
and I'm the head of the Americas here at the British Museum. Welcome to this tour, my name
is Cecilia Pardo I'm the curator for this exhibition and we're very thankful to the
Ministry of Culture and to the Art Museum of Lima in Peru. The Andes is one of the most
extraordinary areas of cultural development in the world but this is the first time in
the British Museum's history that there's ever been a comprehensive exhibition to explore
them. The title Peru a journey in time isn't just a flippant title, it really means something.
We take the last three and a half thousand years and we've selected six separate cultures.
You go on a journey chronologically through time, but during the exhibition we have these
cross-temporal moments where we bring out the key themes and essence of Andean societies.
We introduce the visitors into a section where objects talk about how the environments played
an essential role. The societies that inhabited this part of the world managed to survive
and thrive in one of the most remarkable though challenging environments in the whole planet
because Peru has one of the driest deserts in the planet but is also home to one of the
richest oceans. So the objects they all incorporate aspects of environment. So for example we
have textile with feathers created by a coastal society incorporating feathers coming from
the Amazon or a lot of beads in a breastplate made up from Turquoise coming from far away
regions. Through these objects, these societies managed to share and communicate their own
system of beliefs where environments played a key role. So the landscapes of the central
Andes are connected by an incredible road network which dates back millennia and covers
forty thousand kilometres, and it's this road network which takes us to our next stage which
is the site of Chavin De Huantar which is located at one of the lowest passes over the
high mountains of the Andes.
Chavin is a ceremonial centre, that's how it's described by archaeologists, you get
these objects that tell the story of people coming together for the first time with sort
of shared understanding of the landscape within which they live, what you start to see here
is a sort of creation of an iconography that then repeats throughout time through each
of the different cultures of the Andes. If you look at these ear plates here they're
not only incredible for their size but they also have these wonderful features combined
together you can see these faces with an eye and you have this sort of feline head and
then these snakes coming down from them. These ear plates were found in a funerary context
with a body and they were placed by the ears they look almost impractical to actually have
been worn in themselves but their size talks to the status and importance of the individual
with which they were buried. I love this vessel here which has the spondylus shell and the
strombus gigas a conch shell together in a ceramic vessel found up in the Andes. What
it talks about is the incredible richness of that marine resource and the trade and
exchange networks which are taking objects hundreds of kilometres right up into the Andes.
At the site of Chavin you get these underground tunnels where offerings are made and many
of these strombus shells are actually found in those underground tunnels so you get the
both the ceramic representation but you also get the physical shell which is talking about
what's going on with them, they're being offered up to the gods into these underground water
channels underneath this sacred site.
So from Chavin in the highlands the following section of the exhibition explores the way
the Nasca and the Paracas lived in one of the driest deserts in the planet. They created
massive lines, geometric shapes, and naturalistic drawings in the Pampas, five hundred kilometres
of unfertile soil. Current research though has proved that these spaces were actually
used by the Paracas and the Nasca. People here were using the space and performing rituals
probably in the search for water and fertility. The colours that they used in their pottery
and textiles were very diverse and varied and some of which are very much related to
the drawings that we see in the geoglyphs. So for instance here we have a fragment of
a Nasca blanket with embroideries depicting hummingbirds again birds related with that
search of fertility and also we have a whale which is a mythical being represented in Nasca
iconography which we can also see in not only one but a few depictions in the geoglyphs.
When a Paracas or Nasca person died the community came together to ensure a safe journey into
the ancestral realm where the ancestors would still protect the living. Here we have a funerary
blanket that belongs to the Art Museum of Lima collection. It depicts human beings bearing
special accessories like diadems and nose rings and bearing severed heads which can
be related with the ancestors, so we might think that the human beings depicted in these
textiles are the ancestor into which the deceased is transformed through the journey into the
afterlife. One of the biggest objects in the exhibition is this Nasca drum. It is very
important not only because it was probably used as a musical instrument in special ceremonies
but also because it depicts one of the main narratives of Nasca mythology. in the drum
we see five deities probably ancestors which combine elements from different animals capturing
severed heads and also depictions on the way the Nasca thought about life, death, and rebirth.
Eight hundred kilometres to the north of the Nasca the Moche culture is flourishing in
the same coastal desert. The Moche have a way of life that centres around these huge
pyramid complexes but one of the things I like most about the Moche is their traditions
of ceramics. They’re I think the best ceramicists in the ancient world. If you look at these
portrait vessels it really starts to bring the actual people alive. Many of these portrait
vessels have been traced through time where the same individual grows older and you see
that face changing as they get older through time. If you look at this particular vessel
you can see the person, they have these ear spools coming through the earrings, you have
the hair bound behind the head, this textile woven cap or a representation of a textile
woven cap, and then here the stirrup vessel design which is so distinctive of Moche pots.
In reality these wouldn't have been used as vessels for drinking or using drinking water,
they're just used as a sort of iconographic representation of the person their personality,
their status within society. These extraordinary wooden sculptures depicting
mythical beings officers and prisoners were found in the Macabi islands just off the coast
of northern Peru. When we were doing research in the stores at the British Museum in the
early stages of this project, these objects appeared and although they have been briefly
studied in the early 20th century they have never been on display before. We think that
actual sacrifices might have been taken place in the islands according to this vessel where
we see Ai Apaec the main Moche deity takes naked prisoners into the islands in this boat.
We have this ceramic vessel in the exhibition that's a representation of an early Moche
fisherman on a reed boat going out into the Pacific ocean. This sort of links with one
of our collaborators for the exhibition Victor Huamanchumo, he is a fisherman third generation
fisherman in the village of Huanchaco right next to these ancient sites on the coast.
He creates the reed boats today for his own fishing in everyday life as many fishermen
do along the coast, and starts to talk about the technology these continuities of practice,
and what's really interesting is that another collaborator who works an archaeologist who
works in the region found that the name Huamanchumo is found in the chronicles relating to the
Chimú culture. I love these moments in the exhibition where the past and present are
so closely and intimately interwoven and connected, you can totally see the practice and people
of this part of the world totally connected through time.
About fourteen hundred the Inca empire emerged in the central Andes, it was the biggest empire
in the Americas. The origins of the Inca lies very much in the influence of past cultures,
they learned on the past knowledge, specifically on the Wari. Here we have three Wari objects
depicting a Wari officer wearing a tapestry. So the technology of the textile tapestry
was introduced by previous cultures and the Inca developed it and took it to another level.
And one of the main reasons why the Inca developed such a complex and vast empire in such a short
span of time was because of the use and introduction of the the khipu. The khipu was a set of knotted
strings that was used for accountability, for accounting numbers of populations of crops
to understand the population that they managed. The success of the Wari and Inca empires were
really underpinned by incredible feats of human engineering and technological innovation.
Whenever you visit the Andes you can see this evidence in the landscape. Tens of thousands
of square miles of agricultural terracing dating back hundreds of years. The irrigation
systems at these high altitudes are amazing - they siphon off water right up where the
snow is melting and then follow the contours of the mountains for miles as you go around
those mountain profiles bringing water to where they need it. You get these terracing
systems where stone walls capture the sunshine warmth during the day and help protect the
plants at night from frost. One of our collaborators is Manuel Choqque a fourth generation farmer
at this high altitude who talks about the inherited knowledge of the agricultural understanding
of these landscapes. This vessel here is a Chaquitaqlla which is like a representation
of a digging stick, and then on top you've got a vessel covered with these sort of maize
cobs or maize kernel designs. It's talking about that relationship with agriculture and
the vessel itself is actually a Paccha which would have been filled with liquid and then
drunk out of a ritual drink probably fermented maize that have been used in a festival. These
understandings of agriculture are hugely intergenerational, the ability of different communities to learn
the specifics of their local climatic and environmental conditions and then adapting
plants to meet them. So although the Inca empire developed the largest empire in the
Americas they were very short-lived - they only lived and existed for 150 years because
in 1532 Francisco Pizarro and his Spanish troops arrived in northern Peru encountering
the last Inca Atahuallpa, an event that marks the beginning of the Spanish colonial rule.
One of the objects that marks the European encounter the European arrival into the new
world is a manuscript that contains written documents alongside drawings, probably the
first drawings done by the Spanish which evidenced the way they looked and described the Incas
and their ways of life. Something particularly interesting about this manuscript is that
it describes and it depicts some tunics and tapestry that the Incas wore and that haven't
been preserved across time, so we have to be careful when we study these written documents
because sometimes they can be biased as they reflect the way one person thought about Inca
society. Textiles have been a theme throughout the exhibition weaving these ideas of different
cultures, using them in different ways through time so when we were planning the exhibition
we started to think about the idea of a new textile commission and we started talking
to friends and colleagues throughout Peru, so we invited Nilda Callañanupa to collaborate
with us and she has been working for more than 30 years with weavers belonging to different
Andean communities that have been using technologies in weaving and using raw materials and waist
looms and technologies that date back to pre-Columbian times, so we had many discussions, conversations
and showing her objects and the narrative of the exhibition and they came up with the
idea of a textile that can reflect upon the main themes addressed in the exhibition. The
idea of sort of using the Tawantinsuyu, the four parts of the Inca empire to create a
textile with four quadrants each inspired by one of the textiles in the exhibition.
So behind us you can see this textile in reality. It's got the Wari, the Inca, the Colonial
and the contemporary aspects all bonded together through a Chakana cross in the middle representing
indigenous identity today, and what I really liked about it was that we created a video
to accompany the work and you see people discussing their own histories as they're creating the
object and their own reflections on those time periods of the past which I think is
a very powerful way of sort of embodying knowledge into the actual object. Totally and I think
that in the video we see the weavers spinning the yarn, dyeing the yarn, and weaving it
in waist looms and in other type of looms in the same manner that pre-Colombian societies
did it hundreds and thousands of years ago. And so I hope you've enjoyed this introduction,
we've tried to sort of give you only a tiny glimpse of a much bigger exhibition that explores
some incredible cultures throughout the central Andes and we really hope you'll come and visit
the exhibition for yourselves and see it in all its real splendour and colour. There are
so many more objects and stories in the exhibition that I'm sure you will enjoy when you come.
The societies that inhabited this part of the world managed to survive and thrive in
one of the most remarkable though challenging environments in the whole planet because Peru
has one of the driest deserts in the planet but is also home to one of the richest oceans,
providing a lot of maritime resources for these cultures. So the objects that we present
in the exhibition they all incorporate aspects of environments being plants, animals, mountains,
and the whole environment that was really incorporated in to the main system of beliefs.