Fifty-year-old boxes illuminate the Middle Horizon in Ica, Peru: Textile conservation and new research opportunities

Summary

As part of a Practicum in Analysis and Conservation of Organic and Textile Artifacts, class participants worked with materials recovered in salvage excavations between 1955 and 1975, which form part of the collections at the Museo Regional de Ica “Adolfo Bermudez Jenkins.” We carried out documentation and preliminary interventions to improve preservation of textiles from a mortuary context, as well as miscellaneous artifacts with unknown provenience, diverse in materials and techniques. Here we present the problems and opportunities of “excavating the museum” and discuss our conservation decisions and the information recovered.

Each box contained far more material than expected, and a variety of artifacts and conditions provided the class with experience in a range of conservation strategies. Many artifacts combined diverse organic materials with some textile components; a set of hairpieces, apparently similar, provided several surprises. Although the mortuary assemblage had been separated from the human remains, the process of separating and rehousing wadded and folded textiles provided information on gender and social status. Our conservation work generated an expanded list of cataloged artifacts and new storage requirements, leading to a collection management issue as well as opportunities for further research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Excavating the Museum: New Research on Old Collections

Keywords

Spatial Coverage