Today, on Wednesday, June the fifth, the Study Abroad group and I went to National Museum of Archeology, Anthropology, and History, as well as the Museo De Larco. At the National Museum, the group and I observed different artifacts, paintings, and objects from various periods of Peru's history, ranging from the beginnings of the indigenous people, to the rise of the Incan Empire and the Spanish conquest, and to the progress of Peru into modern day society. Some of these artifacts included jugs that were crafted by different tribes, including the Incas. The main hypotheses for the purpose of the jugs is that the jugs were used as water jugs, and the smaller holes in the jug that weren't used for drinking were used to replace the emptied water with air, causing less splashing motion in the jug.
The patterns on the jugs themselves were very intricate and interesting. Some of the patterns consisted of animals or plants, some consisted of human faces, and some consisted of mythological creatures or demons. The horizontal symmetry of the crab jug was nearly perfect, as was the horizontal symmetry of some of the other jugs. Other dealt with transitional symmetry, patterns, or no mathematic symmetry at all, rather showing the structure of thing of interest in a different perspective, or to show an image for some ritual or cultural reason.
The primary focus at this museum, to me, was the quipus. A large part of our course materials, quipus are knotted cords that were supposedly used as recording devices for numerous types of information, whether it be dates and months, harvests, crops, tax revenue, or any other system that needed to keep records. The main chord would be used to house multiple cords that's knots would be used as numbers in a base 10 system. It was interesting to see the many different aspects of the quipus, between the amount of knots, colors, sizes, lengths, and spacing, and to see the other possible ways the quipus could have been used during the Incas time.
After we finished at the National Museum, the group and I went the Larco Museum, or Museo De Larco. Founded by Rafael Larco Hoyle, who was inspired by his father, Rafael Larco Herrera, the museum contained thousands of different Peruvian artifacts and valuables, ranging from silver plated shirts, to ceramic bowls, to quipus, and even trepedated skulls. Like the National Museum, the Museo De Larco's artifacts ranged between near perfect horizontal or vertical symmetry, such as the giant black vase, to having a repeating pattern, such as the brown artifact below, to random, non-symmetrical geometry. I did notice that a staircase type shape was amongst a lot of the artifacts, indicating that this shape may have some symbolic meaning with these ancient cultures, or was possibly just a very popular shape.
Unlike the National Museum, the Museum De Larco was in possession of not one, but two quipus. Like the quipu at the National Museum, the quipus at the Museum De Larco consisted of different knotted cords, but these quipus not only had pendant cords, but also top cords- cords that are assumed to be the sum of the knots on the pendant cords below the top chord. There are, however, different ways the top cords are placed onto the main cord; in the picture, the top cords on the left are knotted next to the left most pendant cord. One of the top cords on the right, however, is knotted with the pendant cord on the main cord. This observation of difference, along with color, length, knotting, and other differences, will help to progress on what exactly each quipu means.
The other artifacts and paintings in the museums, such as the paintings of Spanish royalty and the artifacts of Amazonian tribes, were not relevant to the course, but were interesting none the less. Overall, the museums were very interesting to explore, and the thousands of artifacts from the Peruvian tribes, including the Incas, were very interesting and informative. It will be an amazing experience to further study the mathematical values found within these Peruvian artifacts, along with further understand and analyzing the quipus.
-AMcTier
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