A museum that decided its reserve collection was not an embarrassment to be hidden but the best room in the building.
Rafael Larco Hoyle opened this museum on the twenty-eighth of July, 1926 — Peru's independence day, which tells you something about the register in which he meant it — not in Lima at all but at the family sugar estate at Chiclín, in the north. The collection had begun the year before with some six hundred vessels his father acquired; Larco then bought two further collections outright, eight thousand pieces from one owner and six thousand from another, and kept going until he had gathered something in the order of forty-five thousand objects. In the 1950s the whole of it came south to the capital, into an eighteenth-century vice-regal mansion in Pueblo Libre that is itself built over a pre-Columbian pyramid of the seventh century. I like that stratigraphy very much on paper. Whether one can feel it standing in the courtyard is precisely the sort of thing I am not entitled to say yet.
What has kept the place on my list for years is not the gold gallery, though there is one, and not the erotic ceramics, which are the reason most people can name the museum at all. It is the storerooms. Larco opened his reserves to the public and they have stayed open — thirty thousand catalogued vessels ranked on shelves you walk between, by the museum's own account the only storerooms in Peru and among very few anywhere that any visitor may simply enter. Every curator I know has, at some point, defended keeping ninety per cent of a collection behind a door on grounds of conservation, insurance and interpretation. All three arguments are real. Larco appears to have weighed them against the plain good of letting people look, and decided the other way, in 1926, before it was fashionable to think so.
So the entry stands as an intention with a plate number against it. The season noted in my index is August — the coastal winter, when Lima sits under flat grey cloud for weeks, which is poor weather for the city and perfect weather for a day spent indoors among pots. My plan is unremarkable and I intend to keep to it: the permanent galleries first, in the order the museum wants, and then the whole of the afternoon in the storerooms with nothing arranged afterwards. I have read a good deal about this museum. I have not stood in it, and I will not pretend the reading is the same thing.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I will not illustrate a room I have not been standing in.
Six hundred years of a civilisation were put in order by watching the shape of a spout change.
The Moche left no writing. What they left, in enormous quantity, was pottery — and in the 1940s Larco worked out that the stirrup-spout bottles could be sorted by the form of the spout alone, into five phases running early to late, and that the sequence held against the layers in the ground. He published it in 1948 as Cronología arqueológica del norte del Perú. For the better part of a century, Moche I to V is how anyone dated a Moche anything.
It is being revised now. Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling have pulled at the edges of the scheme, and the tidy north-to-south single ladder looks less tidy than it did. That is not a demolition; it is what happens to a good idea that was useful enough to test. Larco published the erotic ceramics too, as Checan in 1966, at a time when a great many collections quietly kept theirs in a drawer.
And the reason the revision is even possible is on the shelves. A chronology built out of thirty thousand pots can only be argued with by someone who is allowed to see all thirty thousand. The storerooms are not a visitor attraction bolted on afterwards. They are the working paper, left open on the desk.