Amherst firm helps Incan artifacts return home

AMHERST - Eleven years ago, architect Ann W. Marshall replicated Incan stonework for the walls of a traveling exhibit featuring artifacts from the famed mountain city of Machu Picchu.

This month, she and Elizabeth Morgan, a colleague at Kuhn Riddle Architects in Amherst, are helping to install that exhibit permanently in a building with the real thing. Its new home will be in a former Incan palace in what was once the ancient culture's capital, modern-day Cusco, Peru.

"Imagine a wall built without mortar that is centuries old, but today you can't slip a piece of paper into the space between the stone blocks," Marshall said.

Marshall designed the original exhibit, "Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery," working with her husband, Michael A. Hanke, and his Amherst-based museum exhibit company Design Division. "Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery" featured artifacts collected in Peru by American explorer Hiram Bingham III in 1912 and donated to Yale University's Peabody Museum.

At the time, the traveling exhibit was state-of-the-art, with an animated light-and-sound map of Machu Picchu and a great amount of effort put into introducing visitors to the Incans as people.

"We wanted to give people a feel for the architecture, the colors and so forth," she said. "We took people inside the house of an Inca. There was a figure there talking in traditional clothing who spoke to visitors."

The artifacts - there are 329 museum-quality items in the collection -were also displayed in a more meaningful way.

"Instead of putting them in big cases along the wall we divided them up into categories," Marshall said. "Metalworking, everyday life. Religious life."

Some objects are gold, she said. But most are pottery or made of human or animal bone.

The exhibit went around the country, appearing at Chicago's The Field Museum among other places, before returning to New Haven, Conn.

But the Peruvian people wanted the artifacts to return to Peru and have waged a long and at times acrimonious battle to get them back. Peru sued Yale in U.S. Federal Court in 2008, according to The Associated Press

"What's going to happen is that Yale is establishing a center in Cusco," Marshall said.

It will be a joint project with the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco and will be called the U.N.S.A.A.C.-Yale International Center for the Study of Machu Picchu and Inca Culture. The building itself is at least 500 years old.

The return of these artifacts has been a cause for national celebration in Peru. According to news reports, more than 224,000 people turned out to watch the country's president greet the first shipment when it arrived in May.

Morgan said the challenge of moving the exhibit goes well beyond updating the technology and getting everything translated into Spanish. The original displays were meant to fit into a standard museum interior, basically a black box. The palace in Cusco has a series of rooms and the 15th century building itself features not just Incan stonework, but additions made by the Spanish conquistadors.

"We can take the fake walls out and work with the original stonework," Morgan said. "The space also has a naturally lighted courtyard that we can incorporate."

Design Division is small, too small to handle the job on its own, Marshall said. That's why she brought the project to Kuhn Riddle. They are also working with contractors and architects in Peru.