The Triple Crown of Museums

            I can't believe yesterday marked the second week of our journey to Machu Picchu. I hope that time slows down because before we know it we'll be boarding the plane back to Atlanta. The day was jammed packed with three different museums and a food festival in the morning. The museums we went to were some of the best that we have visited on the trip.

            The first museum of the day was the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, which was connected to the Larco museum that we visited in Lima. The set up of the museum was very nice and had many similar artifacts to the ones we had seen at the Larco. I really enjoyed getting to see the many works of different cultures that I had written about for my Geometry essay last week. When I was going through the museums this time, I had a much better idea of the timeline and locations of the different civilations. There were a few displays that really stood out to me. They were the the wooden carvings of the Chimu, the variety of cooking bowls from the Mochica and the size of the aribalos that the Inca are famous for. The wooden carvings were fun to see because there are not many wooden artifacts left since they decompose easier over time. The Mochica's cooking bowls were interesting because it suggested that they would have had different bowls for their poultry, fish and vegetables. I'm not sure if I had just missed the giant aribalos at the other museums or if this museum had three of the biggest I'd seen. The shortest of the three on display was still over 3 feet tall! I wish there was a scale in the picture below, but here is one of the aribalos in a stand.

            The History of the Inca Museum (http://www.sacred-destinations.com/peru/cusco-museo-inka) had many great exhibits that we had not seen in other museums. I really liked the model of the sacred city of Choquequirao. I had not heard of this Incan city before, but the Incas had a lot of sacred cities, including Machu Picchu! There was one section of the city labelled as the administrative Pikiwasi sector that had a building with a round wall facing the northeast. The wall was missing a section which Dr. Brown and I agreed would have most likely been for alignment with a certain sunrise or another celestial alignment. In this museum they also had a painting of Cusco from when it was first being built, and you could see how the city plans made the shape of a puma! The puma was a significant figure in Andean cultures that symbolized the earth. The condor (or bird of prey) and the serpent were the other two figures that represented the heavens and the underworld, respectively. Another amazing fact about the Inca that I had not heard until this museum was that if you were to take the Incan empire at its peak when it controlled the majority of the Pacific coastline of South America and impose that land area over Europe, it would stretch from the northwest of Spain in the Galicia region all the way into western Russia! The museum did not allow photography, however, I wanted to add this in today’s blog so I snuck the picture!

            After a little rest and a lunch break we headed for the hills and the Convent of St. Domingo of Cusco. (http://www.qorikancha.org/Historia.htm) This was a very interesting place because it was built on top of the ruins of Qorikancha, an ancient temple of the Inca. Some of the convent walls were built together with the Incan walls. One exhibit talked about how the Inca had shrines, temples and other sacred places scattered around Cusco called "wakas". All of these places were connected with each other by imaginary lines or "seqes" that started at Qorikancha. There are thought to have been more than 300 wakas connected to Qorikancha by over 40 seqes. In the painting below, you can see the wakas and seqes clearly. Also, the four different colors stand for the four provinces of Cusco. As I said above, this was a great day of sightseeing and we enjoyed some of the greatest museums we've seen so far.