Museo de la Nacion

So as we reached the last couple weeks of our trip, Andrea and I wanted to make sure that we went to go see the Lima Museums.  These are pictures from the Museo de la Nacion.  They didn’t have a major exhibit up but we still got to see some cool artifacts, cultural pots, instruments, and also some colonial era paintings/furniture.  It was interesting because I pretty much breezed through all the colonial stuff: that’s not what I want to see in Peru, I want to see their culture before the conquistadors came!  It was interesting because they had an exhibit about how the different Peruvian cultures (from the mountain area to the jungle to the desert) are actually pretty similar!  They all used similar style pots with animals, people, and architechture depicted through the ceramics.  All cultures weaved/loomed/decorated their fabrics.  All cultures had celebrations with similar musical instruments, parades, and decoration.  It was a really cool exhibit and nice to see similarity and difference together quite harmoniously.

 Lastly we also saw a photo exhibit sponsored by National Geographic that had excerpts from Hiram Bingham’s diary (Yale Assistant professor who “discovered” Machu Picchu) so it was really neat to see what the place looked like 100 years ago in 1912: with vegetation growing over all the buildings that needed to be cleared out, artifacts, skeletons that were waiting to be uncovered in the abandoned city.  It definitely was a nice buffer/preparation for our journey to the actual site in a few weeks!  There is of course controversy that Hiram Bingham discovered the lost city of Machu Picchu because locals to the area all knew about it but he is definitely the first one who scientifically explored the area.

 Overall it was nice to visit the museum, kind of like the Smithsonian of Peru (though sadly not nearly as expansive).  There are a lot of Peruvian artifacts scattered across the world, in North American and European museums and also in the homes of private collectors in these countries.  For example, Yale Peabody museum still has some of the original artifacts from Machu Picchu!  Although it is good to spread knowledge of different cultures across different countries, I feel like Peru and the Peruvian people are definitely missing out on not only the cultural gain from these things but also an economic gain that the country could use.  I hope some of the artifacts will make their way back home in the future.