Amazing treasures from Peru’s forgotten people
Peru: A Journey in Time
British Museum, London WC1
★★★★★
Here’s a surprise: although the British Museum is known for its splendid exhibitions focusing on the great historical cultures of the world, it has never staged a comprehensive show about the peoples of the Central Andes. I would have bet the house that it had celebrated the Incas, given how many gap-year stoners have tripped through the cloud forest of Peru’s Sacred Valley on the trail to Machu Picchu. But no. According to Jago Cooper, head of the museum’s Americas section, the closest it has come was an exhibition devoted to another civilisation altogether, the Moche, who thrived centuries before the Inca, in an entirely different region of what is now modern-day Peru. And even that happened off-site, in 1979, at the now-defunct Museum of Mankind at Burlington Gardens. So, its new exhibition, Peru: A Journey in Time, is long overdue. Given this, you’d expect to find it in the hangar-like Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery; in fact, it’s happening in a smaller space above the Great Court. Moreover, while countless shows at the BM have concentrated on relatively short time periods (the reign of a single Roman emperor, say, or a 50-year slice of China’s Ming dynasty), this one spans four millennia, while limiting itself to 120 objects. The assumption, apparently, is that, apart from the Inca, and, perhaps, the Nasca (famous for their desert “lines”, or geoglyphs, depicting natural phenomena including seaweed and hummingbirds), Andean societies – which, for thousands of years, developed in isolation from the West – still lack sufficient name recognition in Europe to get star billing. Hands up if you can tell me something about the coastal kingdom of the Chimú. What about the Wari? No? Me neither, before I visited the show.
The catalogue suggests that, for too long, Andean peoples have been dismissed in the West as “exotic” and “primitive” (because they didn’t develop writing or invent the wheel), even barbaric, given their propensity for human sacrifice: around AD 1450, for instance, in a mass execution in northern Peru, the hearts of more than 140 children were removed. Inside the exhibition, there are wooden figurines that, despite having belonged to the British Museum since the 1870s, have never been seen in public.
The show advocates a reset. Its curators zero in on six different cultures, culminating with the Inca, who, from 1532, fell foul of the Spanish conquistadors. Each is represented in its own bay by a handful of judiciously selected objects, including masks, pottery vessels and ornaments. Certain overarching themes link these various historical moments: an alternative, cyclical conception of time, melding together past, present, and future (which, sadly, I never quite got my head around, thanks to some abstract explanatory mumbojumbo); an enterprising engagement with a challenging and diverse environment, encompassing desert, highlands, rainforest, and the riches of the Pacific; the veneration of fanged, feline hybrid divinities, inspired by the jaguar or puma, as well as snakes and birds; and a lust for shells from the ocean’s depths that, in a currency-free economy based on reciprocity, were highly valued.
Occasionally, the exhibition’s attitude towards its subject is overly dewy-eyed – there’s a lot of talk about what we in the West can learn from these Andean paragons. But the astonishing artefacts on display, around two sixths of which have been lent to the UK for the first time by Peruvian institutions, quell any quibbles. The naturalism of Moche portrait vessels – ceramic vessels featuring carvings of human faces – for instance, is breathtaking. Likewise, the many vibrant textiles: a 15th-century feathered tunic coloured red, yellow, and blue, like a target painted by Jasper Johns; an early Nasca mantle depicting masked figures clutching severed heads on ropes; a memorable headdress, with feathers of liquorice purple, orange, yellow, and green,
emblazoned with a sea-creature motif. With any luck, this polished show will persuade the powers-that-be to mount future exhibitions telling the stories of individual Andean societies in greater depth.
From tomorrow until Feb 20. For more information: britishmuseum.org