Day 991
Amano
Today we visited the Amano Textile Museum in Lima. It’s our second textile museum of the trip, the first being the Mola Museum in Panama, which, though small, was soon voted our favourite museum of the trip. So, the Amano had a lot to live up to. Though bigger than the Mola, this too was a relatively small museum considering the quality of the exhibits and the story it had to tell. We started off with a simple history of creating textiles, not just in Peru, nor even just South America, but for the whole world. We learnt about how different techniques were developed on different continents, silk in China for example. How the skills developed as the communities became more sophisticated, from a simple free-spun piece of material to the use of looms. Then from simple cloth to intricate designs, layers, patterns even a way of recording the income and wealth of communities by a series of knots in string.
We had seen some textiles in other museums but the quantity and quality here was mind blowing. We also got a much deeper understanding of how it was made, the different plants used, what for and why. The patterns on the garments are believed to be a statement about the wearer, his or her position in the community which could be ‘read’ by others so they could recognise just who they were meeting.
The patterns were also a link and a form of homage between the wearer and the Gods. Most of the items on display were found in burial chambers and the condition, in the material, colours, designs and patterns was jaw-dropping. Different cultures over the centuries and areas developed and progressed techniques so the age of the garment and the people it belonged to is clear to historians. The cloth is literally talking to us from centuries past. We left shell-shocked by what we had seen. We had a new number 1 museum too!
