Funerary Bundles from the Storeroom: Conservation Choices and Research Opportunities in Alejandro Pezzia’s Salvage Collections.

Summary

Until recently, most textile collections from Peru’s Middle Horizon were the product of looting operations. Fine tunics and headdress elements abound in museum collections, but their relationship to a deceased individual and full textile assemblage is unknown. As a result, items classified as “Wari” have been disconnected from the complex social identities and relationships that they once influenced in life, or reconfigured after death.

Several mortuary contexts with unknown provenience have been located by the staff of the Museo Regional de Ica “Adolfo Bermúdez Jenkins”, product of salvage efforts undertaken by Alejandro Pezzia during the 1960s and 1970s. Two small bundles were documented and received preliminary conservation treatments as part of final projects in the “2015 Practicum in Analysis and Conservation of Organic and Textile Artifacts”. Under the direction of instructor Luis Alberto Peña, two Peruvian teams worked on a conservative approach to retain bundle integrity while providing support. We recovered a surprising quantity of information, including site provenience. Features and contextual relationships observed enhance the significance of other museum collections and may be compared to intact tomb contexts documented in more recent archaeological excavations in the central and southern Andes.

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