Publication Date:
2024-05-30
Description:
A cotton headdress ornamented with several botanical and faunal elements (TM-5074-2) is kept in
the depot of the Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam. There is little information about the provenance of
the object or its context of use. Identified by the museum as a ‘shaman hood’, is said to have been
obtained from an Asháninka indigenous community along the Ene River, Peruvian Amazon. The unusual
composition of the hood, with 16 bundles of bird fragments, 39 bundles of mammal parts, and 3332
seeds, raises several questions. Is the object a traditional Asháninka ornament? Is the combination of
so many distinct elements a result of later additions? Is it possible that the hood was manufactured
for sale? In addition to literature research, this study aimed to identify the plant and animal species
linked to the hood, to verify whether the object in its current composition (covered with plant and
animal ornaments) could have been made in the same region inhabited by the Asháninka communities.
Through the morphological comparison of the plant and animal parts attached to the hood with the
botanical and zoological collections of Naturalis Biodiversity Center, we could identify the species and
trace their geographical occurrence. Eight different plant species, eight bird taxa, and at least eight
mammal taxa attached to the object were identified, most of them native to the Peruvian Amazon.
Finally, with the identification of the species, we proposed possible interpretations for the selection
of plants and animals added to the shaman hood based on the historical context and the Asháninka
worldview.
Keywords:
Museum objects
;
Amazon
;
Provenance Research
;
Seed beads
Repository Name:
National Museum of Natural History, Netherlands
Type:
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Format:
application/pdf
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