The entrance to the Museum of Anthropology’s latest exhibition, Tupananchiskama: Ancient Andean Cosmovision, is flooded with light coming in from the window to the left. The Andean artifacts — mostly clay-painted ceramics — have a view of the sunny pond behind the MOA and the mountains and ocean beyond. As visitors walk deeper into the exhibition, the light falls away and the sound of the pututu (conch shell) and antara (pan flute) fills the space. The exhibition ends in near darkness, with the didactic panels and artifacts prompting viewers to think about the spiritual side of Andean culture. An overhead screen projects star constellations as a voice explains the cultural significance of the constellations in Spanish and English.
Tupananchiskama features Andean art and artifacts collected by former UBC Professor Alan R. Sawyer. The exhibition’s emphasis is on Andean understandings of the universe and the cycle of life and death. Tupananchiskama is Quechua (the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language family spoken in the Americas) for ‘until life brings us together again.’ The name reflects how many of the artifacts in the collection are representations of relationships between humans, animals and gods.
Near the entrance to the exhibition, on the wall opposite the windows, a winding timeline in the shape of a serpent with a cat’s head — a chimera found on a kero (cup) from the Tiwanaku culture — helpfully maps out Andean history. From the domestication of beans in 7,000 BCE and the domestication of guinea pigs in 2,000 BCE to the end of the Inka, Chincha, Chancay and Chimu empires in the 1,500s CE, the serpent illustrates the many overlapping civilizations that rose and fell before the Spanish conquest of the area in and around modern-day Peru. Past the timeline, the artifacts on display reflect how, at any given time, there were many different cultures that called the ecological zones of the Andean mountains home.
The oldest artifact in the exhibition is a projectile point from the Paijan culture. The unassuming stone point is upwards of 13,000 years old. Wall text describes the cultures that the various objects on display come from. There’s a decorated stone mortar from the Chavin culture, the spiritual centre of the Andes from 900–200 BCE; a bowl from the Nasca culture (100 BCE–600 CE), which is known for the famous Nasca Lines. From the Inka culture — the creators of the Tawantinsuyu empire and Machu Picchu — there is an Aribalo Inka jar, with small symmetrical handles sprouting from either side of its wide body.
The exhibition sets artifacts beside textual descriptions of the cultures they originate from, an art history approach that deepens their meaning for museum goers who pause to read. However, even a cursory glance can be rewarding, as the artistry of the painted bowls, vessels and sculptures stands out even without being situated in their cultural context. A bottle with a monkey-like figure emerging out of it and a bowl held up by three humanoid figures carefully sculpted from clay are striking all on their own.
After that, the emphasis shifts to the three realms of existence that make up the trinary Inka structure of the universe: The Hanan Pacha (the upper world of the heavens and the sky), the Kay Pacha (our middle earth), and Ukhu Pacha (the lower world of our ancestors). A large didactic panel explains that one of the tenets that creates harmony in the Inka conception is Ayni (reciprocity), “between people, nature, and the spiritual world.” In many of the artifacts, this reciprocity is portrayed through fluid depictions of animalistic and humanoid spirits, humans in animal skins, and animals and humans interacting. A clay bottle from the Moche culture shows a human taking care of a llama and the llama taking care of the person. The countless other examples of reciprocity in the exhibition demonstrate how utility objects like jars and bowls were made significant by the spiritual meaning of their ornamentation.
I was drawn especially to the case filled with artifacts connected to Kay Pacha, our earthly world. Most of the objects were animals, bottles and jars taking the shape of cats, sharks, deer and a guinea pig. But among the animals, there was also an effigy of a mother and child and a vessel in the shape of a man wearing a fox headdress, his eyes and mouth wide in something akin to shock, resembling the fox’s face above his own.
Standing among the carefully made treasures of a people far away from here in time and place. For a moment, the present falls away. The simple beauty and intricacy of the art connects everyone who wanders through the exhibition to the communities that made and used the objects on display. The design of the exhibition, especially the lighting and auditory elements, differentiates it from others at the MOA and puts all the focus on the artifacts and their history. All written components are in both English and Spanish, from the exhibition’s web page to the didactic panels, rooting the exhibition in the history of the Andes and Spanish colonial conquest.
