The May Break Starts in Lima, Peru. With Museums.

Good doggie: the best boy at the Museo Larco in Lima.
The museum was generally light on dogs. But cats were plentiful. I question the priorities of a whole culture.

I have said this before and I will say it again;  Emergency vacations are much better than vacation emergencies.

Even though the rough contours of this vacation were planned out in the final days of 2023, whether I would take this vacation was in doubt up until the night before I left.  Work load and dog health were both concerns.  But things fell into place and off I went.  Destination: Lima, Peru.

For the next few days, I am staying at the Aloft Hotel in the upscale Miraflores neighborhood of Lima.  The hotel is very nice.  It's part of the Marriott family of hotels.  (You know you're staying in a Marriott branded hotel when you see the Book of Mormon next to the Bible on the hotel room desk.)  I'm on the top floor.  My room looks toward the Pacific Ocean, which is nearby.  

But you can't see it.  Or, to be more precise, I can't see it from my hotel.

This is an "unfinished business" trip.  I am visiting two cities in South America where I have been before.  I only had three night, which meant two days, before in each.  I allocated too little time to both on prior trips, having heard that each was boring and dangerous.  Both were neither.  Both warranted a second look.  This trip is the second look.

The second look started with the Museo Larco, an archaeological museum of the pre-hispanic cultures of Peru that included, but by no means is limited to, the Inca.  I will say this once to avoid repetition:  the pre-hispanic cultures of Peru go back many thousands of years.  The Inca were the last 120 years or so of that several thousand year period.  There is much much much more to pre-Columbian Peru than the people who showed up right before the Spanish conquistadors -- and their advance party -- deadly germs -- arrived.

Let's go in.  Shall we?

The museum was started from the collection of Rafael Larco Hoyle, the first pre-eminent Peruvian archaeologist.  Before Mr. Larco arrived on the scene and start digging around Peru, people in the western world thought pre-Columbian Peru was all about the Inca and only the Inca.

Larco changed that.  Now his collection is a museum.

It's most pottery, including a very large collection of pornographic pottery, but there is more.  There are stone carvings for example.

Before the museum tour is over, we will see mummies and metal-working.

But, for now, it will be all about the pottery.

This Janus-looking head illustrates the duality of nature.

Which was a common theme of all the pre-hispanic cultures of Peru (and, generally, the world over):  Sun / moon.  Day / night.  Wet / dry.  Gold (representing sun and the day) / silver (representing the moon and the night).  Male / female (a duality well represented in the pornographic pottery collection).

Well, not everything was illustrative of the duality of nature, but much was.

In addition to the duality, there was the three levels of existence, something which exists in Judeo-Christian culture, too.  The gods in heaven above.  Man at the level of surface earth.  The realm of the dead in the underworld.  

And each level was represented by an animal.  Bird for the gods in heaven.  Serpents who can travel into the underworld.  Felines who ... rule ... the earth.

All three of those are represented on this piece o' pottery.

Cat.  Draped by serpents on either side,  There is bird in their somewhere, too, but I'm not seeing it now.

Deer were important, too, mainly as sacrifice animals.  But the importance of deer is completely eclipsed by the worshipped cats.

This looks like a salamander -- maybe the GEICO gekko -- on the side of a cup, but I'm sure the symbolism is not that.

And, again, not juts pottery:

But, yes, pottery aplenty:

And the Inca are in the house, represented by quipus.

This is the Inca system of recordkeeping by knotting strings to serve as numerals in a base-10 counting system.

(The Inca did not have a zero in their counting system.  The Maya, like the people of India, did.  Just sayin'.)

Then things got dark.

Not thematically.  It's just that this part of the museum had very low lighting.

Say, is this turquoise?

When turquoise shows up in meso-American art and jewelry, usually from the Maya, it meant that the trade routes extended into the American Southwest.  The four corners region of the USA is the only source of turquoise, at least in any quantity, in the New World, as far as I know.  So I believe the presence of turquoise here indicates that trade routes from Peru extended into modern-day Arizona and New Mexico.  Which I think is interesting.

And here's a mummy:

Mummification was popular in the dry desert regions of Coastal Peru.

And here are a collection of heads:

This is how the warriors wore the nose-plate jewelry that you occasionally see in these museums of pre-hispanic America artifacts.  Kind of reminds me of the look of COVID masks.  Only even more uncomfortable.

Finally, there were several rooms of uncategorized, undescribed pottery just sitting on shelfs.

It is very loosely organized by theme, but only very loosely organized:

This shelf reminded me of the figures in the New Order "True Faith" video.

So much of this.  Here's a self-portrait in a wall of pottery:

At this point, I thought I had completed my walk through the museum.  And I had a sad thought.  Where was all the pornographic pottery that I heard was in the museum collection?  Of course, my interest was purely scientific.  Not prurient.  Banish that thought.

I didn't think I could ask where the pr0n collection was.  But then I saw this sign with an arrow that was just an arrow:

This way to the adult part of the collection.

From this point, things may not be safe-for-work computer viewing.

Let's start with the "Tree of Life".  That's an innocent start to thing isn't it.  Yes, there is fertility imagery inherent in the "Tree of Life," but it's not erotic.

And those guys are relatively innocent looking, no?

But then we hit:

And things go completely off the rails at this point:

A giant stone phallus with a circumference that no phallus should ever have.  At this point, there is nothing left to the imagination:

If you need to stop at this point, I will understand.  If you choose to continue, you were warned:

Of that.  I actually have a ceramic flower-watering kettle that I bought on my last trip to Peru -- at the airport souvenir shop no less -- that looks just like that one.  I guess this was a common motif in Moche culture in Northern Peru, circa 600 AD.

And speaking of that motif, once again we lose all sense of proportionality:

And let's not leave the ladies out of this exaggeration of the naughty parts:

I hope these weren't the everyday stoneware.

Congress is now in session.

That was not a reference to what the politicians in D.C. do to constituents.  I was merely using an alternative meaning of the term "congress."

You might want to reconsider your decision not to bail as we move into the next section of the museum.  I will call this:  The Erotic Dead.

Sexual imagery with death imagery.

As the Beach Boys would say:  Fun fun fun 'til her Daddy took the T-Bird away.

And on that, we end the tour of our first museum of Lima, the Museo Larco.

We can visit the gift shop on the way out.

It sells a lot of jewelry, but, alas alack, no pornographic pottery.  I guess we will have to go to the airport gift shop if we need to fill out our collection with additional pieces.

Across the street from the museum entrance, in a small park, is a statue of the man from whose loins this museum sprung, metaphorically of course:  Rafael Larco Hoyle.