Ancient Peruvian textiles in the Vatican Museums and their link to the Musée du Trocadéro collections

Abstract

The Vatican Museums keep a small collection of about sixty textile fragments mostly Lambayeque, Chimu and Chancay dating back to Late Intermediate Period. Unfortunately, the archaeological provenance of these items is not known. This paper offers a first overview of the history of the collection, describing its contents and, in more details, its most interesting fabrics. We will then suggest that some fragments of the Vatican collection might have been part of textiles once kept in the Musée du Trocadéro, and nowadays preserved in the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.