Re-tying a Wayu: Connecting a Cranial Mask in the Smithsonian to Its Community of Origin in Huarochirí, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Arqueología colaborativa en los Andes: Casos de estudios y reflexiones" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

To prehispanic Andeans in central Peru, donning a facial-bone mask, a wayu, reanimated the dead and honored ancestral victories. Following these masks’ description in the c. 1608 Quechua-language manuscript of Huarochirí, scholars presume Spanish priests destroyed them to extirpate the “idolatry” of ancestor worship. Our collaboration with one town in Huarochirí explores a possible wayu extracted by a North American collector in 1888 and held in the Smithsonian today. Conversations with municipal and communal representatives of that town have identified possible next steps, including (1) the identification and exploration of potential sites from which the wayu was extracted, to promote community identification with the Indigenous past and provide resources via tourism; (2) bioarchaeological research on the wayu’s pre-1608 identity and ritualization; and (3) the ethnohistorical recontextualization of its collection, in which community leaders are brought to the Smithsonian to research the mask’s relationship to modern cultural and environmental heritage (e.g., masked dances and agricultural knowledge). We explore this process as a model for collaborative research across overlapping national ethics and legal imperatives. How might Andean ancestors dislocated by earlier anthropological collecting be reencountered by communities today, and what might archaeologists and other researchers do to help in that process?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Arqueología colaborativa en los Andes: Casos de estudios y reflexiones   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39398.0