Peru, beyond Machu Picchu, at the British Museum

The exhibition “Peru: a journey through time”Tries to go beyond Machu Picchu and explain the most unknown face of Andean civilization through its people, its conception of time, life and death, and the objects and traditions that have made Peru one of the the richest cultural landscapes.

The British Museum in London opens the treasure chest of Peruvian culture to display more than 80 objects covering some 3,500 years of history. “We are highlighting collections that have never been shown to the public“, Explain Cecilia Pardo, curator of the exhibition, which opened this Thursday in the British capital.

“We wanted to go beyond the Incas and Machu Picchu, which is what the British audience knows”, he says.

The environmental diversity of the country, with the contrast produced by the deserts against the rich vegetation of the spectacular valleys, and the treatment of time and the mythology of the Andean people, are the ‘leitmotif’ of an exhibition that has received objects that never before they had left Peru.

“We develop the exhibition based on two key themes: one is the idea of ​​time, and how Andean time works differently from Western time, since it does so in a cyclical and parallel way. It was translated in mythology, in societies such as the Nazca, who believed in life beyond death and that is why we see objects in which the living are represented next to mummies, as if they cared for them”, He assures Pardo.

The bags and bowls where the Andean people kept the coca leaves, with which they fought fatigue and altitude, the fabrics with which the spinners honored the dead and the effects of the consumption of hallucinogenic plants represented in statuettes give color to an exhibition that It reviews the culture from the Chavín (a culture that developed between 1200 BC and 400 BC) until the fall of the Incas.

“These societies did not have a written language like the one we have in Western societies, so their objects convey many messages to us, how they were communicated, their beliefs. It was reflected in objects such as ceramics, textiles. The environment is incorporated because it was key to their life and how they were able to adapt to one of the most spectacular and most dangerous ecosystems on the planet”, Maintains Pardo.

One of the most striking objects is a gold headdress accompanied by two ear plates that was found in a tomb in the Andes. They are decorated with human faces, feline jaws and snake motifs, which is why historians have linked it to the beliefs of the Chavin culture.

Precious stones, shells and pearls accompany an object closely related to death and what awaits the human being behind it, one of the main pillars of the exhibition.

To complete the sample, a small tribute is made to the spinners and their millenary culture, which has allowed many of the tapestries and fabrics to have communicated for thousands of years what happened in Peru.

The main object of this part of the show has been created especially for this exhibition: a loom divided into four parts, each one made with a technique from a different period of Peruvian history. The upper part includes the Wari and Inca cultures and the lower part the colonial and republican.

The exhibition can be visited at the British Museum London from November 11 to February 22, 2022.