Peruvian journey
Daniel Nelson
Because Britain’s foreign interests and influences continue to largely follow colonial lines, South America doesn’t get much of a look-in compared with South Asia or East and Southern Africa.
So Peru, A Journey in Time at the British Museum, is all the more welcome.
Although the exhibition marks Peru’s bicentennial year of independence it’s mostly about pre-colonial central Andean culture. That’s welcome, too, because all we seem to know about that period is bloody sacrifice, coca and gap-year backdrop Machu Picchu.
In reality there were a variety of complex cultures and great ingenuity - the development of maize, of course, but also a 40,000 kilometre network of roads, much of it still in use.
There are star turns, such as a huge drum painted with mythical themes, a gorgeous breastplate and a pair of earplates, a miniature gold llama, knotted strings carrying information, subtly coloured textiles, and pictures of geoglyphs, lines and figures carved into the earth and often fully visible only from above—inevitably spawning subsequent suggestions about visitors from other planets.
About one-third of the artefacts have been provided by nine Peruvian museums, with the remainder coming the British Museum’s own great maw.
The period covered is from 2,500 BCE to the 1500s, but there’s a nod to modern Peru, showing that the European invaders did not manage to totally destroy what they found. Ancient practices and beliefs linger in various forms and apparently about 5 million Peruvians speak an adapted form of Quechua, the language used across the Inca empire.
And the exhibition finishes with a work made for the show by a community of weavers in collaboration with Nilda Calianupa, the founder of the Cusco Centre for Traditional Textiles.
The past lives on—though in the Andean worldview it’s an inherent part of the present.
* Peru, A Journey in Time is at the British Museum, Great Russell Street, WC1, from £15, under-16s free, until 20 February. Info: https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/peru-journey-time