10/20: Lima's Museo Larco: Sacrifice Ceremony, Quipus & Erotic Art!

After spending the morning at the magnificent MALI Museum, we took the bus to the Museo Larco in the Pueblo Libre neighborhood, just south of central Lima. The museum, founded in 1926 in an 18th century mansion built atop a pre-Hispanic ruin, had more than 40,000 ceramics and 5,000 pieces of gold and textiles.

What a spectacular entrance!

Never have we entered a museum after being welcomed with 'purified water with a touch of orange' before!

In the Ritual Warfare Room, we learned that warriors in ancient Peru fought wearing clothing and jewelry made from precious metals. It wasn’t practical when attacking which required speed and easy maneuverability. That’s why these adornments served as a ceremonial function and were only used as religious and status symbols during combat.

Shields weren’t used in hand-to-hand combat, only spears.

Gold headdresses from the Moche Epoch, i.e. 1-800 AD: Headdresses made from gold and alloys of gold, silver and copper decorated the heads of the most important individuals in Moche society. Their designs depicted the faces of felines or human faces with feline features such as teeth. Other mythological animals such as dragons were also represented. The dragons were shown with combinations of feline, bird and serpent features. These emblems of supreme power depicted the supernatural qualities of those who wore them through the materials used, their color, brightness and iconography.

To enlarge any of the photos, just click on the image.

In ancient Peru, important ceremonies were accompanied by music and dance. These artistic expressions created the proper conditions for the ritual experience.

Huari Mummy from the Fusion Epoch, i.e. 800-1300 AD: In ancient Peru as in many other societies, the preparation of the body was an important stage in the deceased's journey into the afterlife.

Funerary bundle head from the Imperial Epoch, i.e. 1300-1532 AD:

Gilded silver clothing from the Fusion Epoch: From the earliest times in ancient Peru, shells, stones, bones and wood were used to make beads which featured sophisticated and detailed designs. The majority of these depicted sacred animals such as birds, serpents, toads and fish. These small pieces were used to make the necklaces, bracelets and breastplates with which the members of the elite were adorned.

In ancient Peru, the real value of gold lay in its status as a symbol of royal identity and supernatural power. Much has been written about the great quantity of gold taken by the Spanish during their conquest of Peru. However, many of the metal products produced were made from alloys which, in many cases, contained minimal amounts of gold. High technology allowed ancient Peruvians to create large objects from very thin sheets, using limited amounts of metal.

The Chimu, who lived during the Imperial Epoch from 1300-1532 AD, were the greatest metalworkers of ancient Peru. This is the only known complete set of gold Chimu clothing in any museum or private collection in the world. The little known about its origin indicates that it was once part of the funerary offering of a great lord who was buried in the mud city of Chan Chan, the capital of the Chimu kingdom. This elaborate dress included plumes in the crown and the borders of the breastplate. The plumes represented birds which were believed to be the only creatures able to approach the sun.

On these gold, silver, and copper alloy Ceremonial Vessels from the Fusion Epoch was a face of a deity with feline fangs and winged eyes. The most important ceremonies in the societies of ancient Peru were associated with fertility, sacrifice and the cult of the dead. In each of these cases, the offering and exchange of fluids was critical, and therefore containers for liquids were of particular importance. During ceremonies, men and women toasted with chicha, the main drink of the Andean world which was made from fermented corn. You may recall that Steven and I were first introduced to chicha while on a walking tour of Bogota about a month ago.

The Sacrifice Ceremony was central to the Moche religion. The offering of the blood of the vanquished to the principal gods was the climax of the ritual combat. Moche art illustrated ways in which defeated warriors were sacrificed. Some ceremonies occurred on islands with the warriors transported on rafts. Another type of sacrifice took place in the mountains and the warriors were thrown off the precipice! 

This piece from the Moche Period was called the Sacrifice of Victims Hurled from Sacrifice Mountain. It's safe to say we've never seen anything like this elsewhere!

Sacrificial Cup and Knife from the Moche Epoch: Warriors' throats were cut and their blood was collected in ceremonial cups to be offered to the priests, the representatives of the gods.

This 18th century oil on canvas illustrated the 'Inca family tree'. The Spanish monarchy of the time tried to legitimize its absolute power over the conquered territories by demonstrating that the conquest of Peru didn't spell out the end of the Inca dynasty.

This 18th century cloth painted with a scene from the Calvary was surrounded by symbols from the Passion of Christ. In it the Jesuits can be seen standing on ladders leaning against the cross as if they were historical figures in the removal of Christ's body from the cross.

Other details in the canvas:

The Quipu from the Imperial Epoch was a system of knotted cords used to record countable information during the Inca Empire. The colors, knots and the distances between the knots enabled those who used the quipus to identify the type of object or the characteristics of the population being recorded.

This record system was very important for an empire sustained by the exploitation of the labor which the population was obliged to provide. The Inca counting system was based on the decimal system. The quipus used a system of knots which were positioned along the length of the cords to represent single units or tens of thousands of units.

The colors of the cords and the structures of the threads and knots contained information regarding the identity of what was being counted and recorded. It was possible to distinguish between information dealing with population, men and women, type of work and production. Some very large quipus were used to record information about communities over a period of time, like a calendar.

As the Textiles Room we'd seen earlier that day at the MALI was definitely one of the highlights at that museum, I was enthralled with the extraordinary collection of textiles at Museo Larco. It was fascinating to learn that the value attributed to textiles by pre-Columbian societies could be compared to the importance given to gold and silver. 

Textiles served as much more than clothing; they were also a medium for the spreading of religious ideas and for transmitting messages to the next world when they were employed to wrap the mortal remains of the dead. They also served as exquisite gifts for the rulers of these societies, as well as to denote social status. 

In the Andean region, cotton was domesticated some 4,500 years ago and it quickly became one of the most important materials used in the processes of spinning and weaving and the production of fishing nets, funerary mantles and fine clothing. The textiles of southern Peru are the most well-known because they were preserved by the dry desert environment of the southern coast.

This textile from the Imperial Epoch was composed of six elements of equal size, each of which framed an anthropomorphic figure wearing a half-moon shaped headdress. 

The cult of the dead was a very important practice in ancient Peru. Mantles from the Paracas culture were used to wrap funerary bundles which contained important religious information which accompanied the dead into the afterlife. One of the museum's Paracas textiles had a world record 398 threads per inch!

The body of the deceased was placed in a fetal position and put in a basket before being wrapped in several layers of textiles. Other objects were also wrapped inside the funerary bundle, including ceramics, gourds and textiles. 

The mantles that were placed closest to the body were the finest and probably formed part of the ritual attire of those who had been interred. In Paracas mantles, the positioning and orientation of the designs, the sequence of the motifs and alternation of colors were filled with meaning. 

In Paracas mantles, the main decoration was formed by two opposed felines which formed a rectangular panel. The feline had two feet resembling those of a bird and an elongated body like that of a serpent. The same pattern was repeated in both the bands on the borders and the decorated central stripes. The only variation was in the combination of the three colors - red, yellow and green - used for the outline of the feline's body.

Through images like this 18th century Portrait of Manco Capac, the founder of the Inca dynasty, the indigenous nobility of Cusco sought official recognition of their rank in response to efforts by Spain's Bourbon kings to rescind the rights and privileges which had been granted by Emperor Carlos V.

Portrait Vessels from the Moche Period: Moche was one of the few ancient civilizations which produced true portraits and represented anatomical features in great detail. The individuals portrayed were members of the ruling elite: priests, gods, warriors and even distinguished artisans. No portraits of women have been found yet.

The end of the Moche culture was not the result of mass destruction caused by the El Nino phenomenon around 600 AD or political conflict with the expansion of the artistic influence of the Huari culture of the southern Andes. 

What occurred was a peaceful transformation influenced by those factors. El Nino caused serious flooding of the irrigation system and also adversely affected coastal fishing activities. That situation weakened the credibility of the rulers who, as representatives of the gods, demanded useless human sacrifices to appease their divine fury. 

The ensuing production and political-religious crisis led the population to seek a new ideology to cling to. That came from the southern Andes and coincided with the expansion of the artistic influence of the Huari culture.

Pre-Columbian art featured a being which was the result of a combination of the physical and supernatural characteristics of the feline, the serpent and the bird. The mythological being combined the strengths of each animal and was represented by multiple combinations: the head of a bird, paws of a feline and body of a serpent for example. To face more serious problems, greater powers were needed like those possessed by this new hybrid god.

This Pachopampa Stele from the Formative Period, i.e. 1250 BC-1 AD, represented female anthropomorphic deity with feline, bird and serpent features.

After touring the Larco Museum, it was interesting to read about Rafael Larco Hoyle who founded it in 1926 at the age of just 25! With the help of his father, he managed to acquire several archaeological collections from Peru's northern coast, bringing together some 45,000 pieces. As he organized the pieces for the new museum, he began to realize that many of them couldn't be attributed to the cultures which had been discovered to date. Faced with the lack of archaeological  information of the 1920s, he began his own scientific research and excavated at a number of archaeological sites on Peru's northern coast.

Larco applied his extensive knowledge of agronomy and climatic conditions to the stratigraphic layers uncovered during his excavations. Approximately every 18 to 25 years, torrential rains are produced on Peru's northern coast as a result of the El Nino phenomenon which result in widespread flooding. Layers of sand blown by the wind accumulated between each period of flooding. When Rafael Larco measured the alternating layers of sand between the marks left by the flooding, he studied how they were related to the construction of ancient tombs. That was how he was able to calculate the age of the cultures he identified. The dates established by his chronological ordering were remarkably accurate and are still being used by modern archaeologists to this day.

Like me, I am sure you have heard the term 'cradle of civilization' although I would have been hard pressed to define it as one of the six regions of the world where the first civilizations emerged independently and uninfluenced by other societies. The museum stated that of all the cultural achievements of Peru, the most important is its inclusion as one of these cradles of civilization, together with China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Mesoamerica.

Almost all museums around the world have important reserves with restricted access to the visiting public. Since its formation in 1926, the storage of the Larco Museum is the only one in Peru and one of the few in the world open to the public.

What a privilege it was to view the museum’s entire collection in an adjacent massive storage room that went on and on and on. Never had we been lucky enough to view a museum’s entire collection before.

At the bottom of the museum's ramp was the most unusual cactus garden ever.

The ramp led to the museum’s large Erotic Art Gallery, also a new collection to us. The guidebook we had said it would make even the most liberated to blush. It did! In today's world, all representations of nudity, genital organs or sexual acts are normally classified as erotic imagery. However, representations of sexuality among the cultures of ancient Peru introduced us to another perspective on such imagery.

In pre-Columbian art, there were detailed representations of both male and female genital organs which alluded to the notion of duality. There were also scenes in which men and women participated in sexual acts that may even included deities or the dead.

The gallery presented a selection of archaeological artifacts from the Larco Museum collection established by Rafael Larco Hoyle in the 1960s as a result of his studies regarding sexual representations in Peruvian pre-Columbian art which he later published in his book.

Larco wrote "As I reach the end of this book on an aspect of Peru's archaeological legacy for which as a point of reference all we have are erotic vessels. I leave my readers to draw their own conclusions." All I can say is ditto!

On a lighter note, some more photos of the museum's very unusual cacti:

We were so glad we had made the time to wander around the Larco Museum as its collection of pre-Columbian artifacts was unbelievable - no wonder it was one of the top-rated activities in Lima. An added bonus was the museum’s stunning exteriors and the gardens with the bright bougainvillea.

Next post: Lima's Cathedral and Archbishop's Palace and no more pottery!

Posted on December 28th, 2017 from Littleton, Colorado.