Lima, Peru
Mochica. 1 - 800 A.D. Apogee Epoch Warrior wearing elaborate headdress, a necklace and a shirt of metal plates
Don Rafael Larco Hoyle was born in 1901 to a wealthy sugar hacienda family in Peru. He became intensely interested in exploring the archaeological record of ancient Peru, and became an avid collector of Pre-Colombian ceramic pieces. Larco´s thousands of artifacts eventually ended up in a museum in an old viceroy mansion on Avendia Bolívar in Lima, where I am standing one hour before closing, staring up and down and across the endless shelves of the storage room at over 25,000 faces preserved in ceramics from several Pre-Inca civilizations across Peru.
I stare back over two thousand years at faces of endless variety - sad, forlorn, confused, tired, enraged, on the war path; some appear to have African facial features, others appear to be wearing a Spanish nun´s robes. They sit, frozen in time, still figures on a dusty shelf, until you look them in the eye, and their world comes to life before you, the ocean breeze and the buzz of traffic seeping through the open window.
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