shape, but its glossy surface was achieved with a glaze, a mixture containing silica and metal oxides and other materials that creates a hard, glassy surface after being 昀椀red at very high temperatures (昀椀g. 42). The double body may represent two lucumas (Pouteria lucuma), a fruit native to Andean valleys. The small bird on one spout contains a whistling mechanism, continuing a tradition established some 2,500 years earlier. By the late eighteenth century, ceramics that once had been tossed aside became part of a new interest in antiquity manifest in both Europe and the Americas. Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, a Basque cleric appointed to a bishopric in Peru by Charles III of Spain, worked with a team of artists to document both the present and the past of the province of Trujillo in the 1780s. Inspired by the king’s sponsorship of excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, the bishop set out to discover his own American antiquity, documenting the 昀椀nds in a volume of watercolors, one of nine devoted to life in the 35 province. Some of the antiquities illustrated in those 42. Double-chambered bottle. Colonial; Peru, early 17th century. works survive to the present day in the collections of the Ceramic and glaze, H. 5 ⼀挀 in. (14 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museo de América, Madrid. New York; Museum Accession (X.2.292) Antiquities continued to be unearthed in the nine- teenth century both intentionally, for the creation of local species—it is not clear where one 昀椀gure ends and the collections as well as for the expanding market for antiq- other begins—and ultimately confounds easy analysis. uities abroad, and unintentionally, as sites were uncovered through the expansion of agricultural 昀椀elds or as a result Afterlives of Antiquities of modernizing interventions, such as the construction 36 The Spanish capture of the Inca emperor Atahualpa in of railroads. The collections assembled in the second Cajamarca in 1532 was the decisive moment in what half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of became a decade-long campaign to establish the new the twentieth were truly staggering in size: José Mariano Viceroyalty of Peru, one that saw a devastating loss of Macedo (1823–1894), a Peruvian doctor, amassed a col- Native American life through newly introduced diseases lection of some 2,000 works, which he eventually sold against which the Indigenous population had no resis- to Berlin’s Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde (Royal tance. Parallel to the military invasion, a spiritual con- Museum of Ethnology, today’s Ethnologisches Museum 37 quest was mounted to destroy any vestiges of Indigenous of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). The same museum religious practices, resulting in incalculable numbers acquired the Wilhelm Gretzer collection, totaling some 38 of objects being rooted out and destroyed in the six- 44,000 works, in 1907. Peru’s own national museum was teenth and seventeenth centuries. As ancient sites were established in Lima in 1822, and a later, private museum, plundered in the search for gold and silver, the ceramic the Museo Larco, assembled some 45,000 works by the vessels found in the course of ransacking them were middle of the twentieth century. tossed aside by the Spanish, who considered the material The Met began acquiring ancient Peruvian ceramics of no value and the forms of little interest. in the late nineteenth century, but on a much smaller scale. Despite these prevailing forces, in many communities One of the earliest acquisitions still in the Museum was aspects of traditional life continued, albeit in new ways. purchased from the Honorable Richard Gibbs, U.S. envoy In the 昀椀rst century or so following the Conquest, Peruvian to Peru, with funds provided by Henry Gurdon Marquand potters began to incorporate European technologies and (1819–1902), a 昀椀nancier, collector, Trustee of The Met, and, motifs in their ceramics. An early colonial double-spout- eventually, the institution’s second president (see 昀椀g. 23). and-bridge vessel, for example, retains an ancient bottle The Museum’s interest in ancient American art waxed 43