How can pottery-related traditions connect to questions of Diaguita-Kakán identity, territory, and heritage preservation? The project “Aticks Ypachay” embarks on these questions by working with an underdocumented collection from the region of Coquimbo, Chile, at the British Museum.

Diaguita-Kakán ceramics from the collection of the British Museum. Photo: Lasta Anku Association. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

“Aticks Ypachay” (Reviving Mother Nature;Kakán) is a collaborative project between Chilean indigenous Diaguita-Kakán association Lasta Anku, Diaguita- Kakán researcher Vicente Antonio Alfaro Norton, SDCELAR, and the collections from the British Museum. The project aims to document, study, and connect a pottery collection from the region of Coquimbo currently underdocumented with Diaguita-Kakán communities and potters in the Limarí province, Coquimbo, Chile. This collective endeavour is focused on the study and documentation of 27 ceramic vessels in participation with local potters and researchers, creating new meanings around their history, production, and cultural relevance. With a primary focus on understanding the material practices and reviving the traditional knowledge associated with pottery production, the vigorous involvement of local traditional Diaguita-Kakán authorities allows to situate these ancestral ceramics within their living present.    

The Diaguita-Kakán: 

Diaguita-Kakán are indigenous peoples that live in the territory of the Norte Chico in Chile between the 3rd and 5th regions. This includes the transverse valleys, coasts and mountains of Copiapó, Huasco, Elqui, Limarí, Choapa, Aconcagua, and Mapocho, territories inhabited for at least 12,000 years. The continuous existence and re-enactment of material traditions are where Diaguitas connect their heritage with their ancestral cosmology. Diaguitas still practice traditional agriculture, the natural medicine of the meikas (healers), pirqueneria (mining), Bailes Chinos (Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, UNESCO 2014), gastronomy, stonework (unique stones in Abya Yala such as lapis lazuli and combarbalita, the national stone of Chile and unique to Combarbalá), fishing, weaving, astronomy, and Andean transhumance. In that way, the project is meant as a part of a larger cultural context, where the depth of the Diaguita-Kakán culture is explored from its material heritage, discernible in the British Museum collection of funerary and household vessels. 

Diaguita-Kakán ceramic, Am1939,08.1, Photo: Lasta Anku Association. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Ceramic traditions in the Limarí Valley can be traced back to the first agricultural and pastoral communities of the area, the Molle culture, an ancestral Diaguita-Kakán peoples who inhabited the territory from 300BCE – 700 CE, during the early ceramic period. From this period onwards, there are two basic types of pottery: the gritty ware used for cooking and domestic purposes, and decorated, ritual sacred ceramics used in ceremonial, ritual, and mortuary contexts. The subsequent cultural phase, known as Las Animas, began around 700 CE with the introduction of polychrome geometric designs painted on the interior and exterior of wide bowls. Around 1000 CE, new forms of pottery and decorations began to appear, with complex and infinitely diverse geometric designs in what became known as the Diaguita culture. These bands of red, white, black, and sometimes ochre geometries were painted across bowls, vases, urns, and different forms of jars, often incorporating anthropomorphic and zoomorphic designs. These chronological categories are not as limited as they were once thought to be, with a continuation of the oldest ceramic traditions of the first potters evident in the present. Towards the end of the 15th century, the Limarí was forcefully incorporated into the Tawantinsuyu, the Incan Empire, which saw the introduction of Cuzqueñan pottery forms that utilised local Diaguita motifs.

Diaguita-Kakán pottery vessels, Am1939,08.10, Am1939,08.2, Am1939,08.11, Photo: Lasta Anku Association. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Articulating the Indigenous association based in Combarbalá, Limarí, Chile, and the collections of the British Museum, the project is intended as a bridge where the Diaguita-Kakán bring their knowledge, traditions, and expertise in pottery-making into the Museum. As a result, the collaborative documentation and study create insightful ideas into Diaguita’s material culture, its oral traditions, and its contemporary presence in today’s Chile.  

By means of a collaboration with the Lasta Anku Educational Association, this project will further produce pedagogical material for Diaguita-Kakán teachers to use in schools, centred around the relevance of local sources of raw material for pottery production, the changes in its use across time, and their journey to the British Museum through the collection. This project, then, explores the symbolic meaning of pottery and its makings in the past and present. These outputs will contribute to highlighting the role that ancestral ceramics have in visualising and strengthening the territorial struggles of Diaguita-Kakán communities in the face of climate change and increasing extractive activities in the Limarí Valley. 

Photos from the Lasta Anku Seminar II “From Museums to a Live Peoples: Heritage. Identity and Human Rights [De los museos al Pueblo Vivo: Patrimonio, Identidad y DDHH]. Monte Patria, Limarí, Coquimbo. June 30 – July 1, 2023. From left to right: Jenifer Araya Flores, Vicente Alfaro Norton, Alexis Escobar Muñoz and Katherine Galleguillos Zepeda. First time photos of the Cruz Montt collection at the British Museum were shared with communities.

Climate change and pottery production: 

The ecological context of the Limarí region is a relevant angle of this project as it is a zone impacted by climate change and extractivism. Lasta Anku’s fieldwork in Chile, conducted between September 2022 and primarily in July 2024 for SDCELAR, has shed light on how Diaguita’s pottery production connects ancestral spirituality, traditional knowledge and the use of natural resources, now endangered, with ceramic-making. Pottery production is embedded and depends on natural resources such as clay – tuturako (river reed flowers)-, water, plants, and minerals for creating pigments. Diaguita-Kakán ceramics are inextricably tied to the nature in the community’s land. Likewise, the vessels are a tangible testament to the Diaguita-Kakán close relationships with their territory. 

Diaguita-Kakán educator Felix Honores Tello in San Pedro de Pichasca, Rio Hurtado (left). Limarí River, Alcones, Limarí Valley, Chile. Photo: Lasta Anku Association (right).

“Aticks Ypachay” converges different traditions of pottery-making, highlighting the importance of economic and ecological adaptations. Lasta Anku and SDCELAR connected with over 20 potters in rural and urban contexts across the Limarí, with three potters (Mojkaka’ey) specifically chosen for this project for their trajectory within the Diagutia-Kakán community to discover new stories behind this material tradition: Rosa Elena Zepeda Araya (Combarbalá) who works with ancestral techniques and natural materials from the territory in her studio, Taller Llankay; Moisés Villalobos Vicencio (Chingay, Combarbalá) who traditionally creates ceramics in a rural environment, within the space of transhumance; and Meika (healer) Maria Anjelica Araya Jimenez (Monte Patria) who constructs ceramics that have a ceremonial and medicinal purpose. Each Mojkaka’ey works with ceramics in different scenarios, opening multiple points of entry when thinking about pottery production, and how it relates to its context while also being in dialogue with a wider Diaguita-Kakán historic culture and legacy. By bringing their plural voices, their diverse perspectives complement and create a more complex and enriching documentation of the vessels in the British Museum. 

Jars (mojchi’ck) made by Rosa Zepeda Araya, Llankay Workshop, Combarbalá. Photo: Lasta Anku Association.

The Collection: 

The Carlos Cruz Montt collection at the British Museum, from where this ceramic collection was acquired, is almost all from the Diaguita period (900CE-1536CE). The collection is made up almost entirely of ceremonial and mortuary ceramics. Only one of the 27 vessels is from another phase – Am1939,08.1 – probably (300BCE – 800CE), due to its polished finish and engraved decoration. Some ceramics – Am1939,08.4a & 4b – are from infants’ graves, reflected by their ‘shoe pot’ shape and their relationship with motherhood and nourishment. Other vessels – such as Am1939,08.8 & Am1939,08.3 – show cosmological aspects such as the importance of certain animals and the role of the shaman in the community.

Vicente Alfaro Norton visiting the Diaguita-Kakán collection. Photo: Santiago Valencia Parra. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Collaborative Documentation: 

Following several community meetings between the Lasta Anku Association, project’s principal investigator Vicente Alfaro Norton, and SDCELAR curators, Lasta Anku conducted fieldwork in the Limarí Valley in July 2024, aimed at identifying key outputs as well as engaging with potters and interested collectives of the Diaguita-Kakán communities. This October 2024, Vicente was hosted by the SDCELAR team to visit the British Museum to conduct a preliminary study and photograph the Coquimbo collections, being accompanied by a remote visit of the materials held online with members of the Lasta Anku association, as other community members.  

By engaging with the collection, Vicente was able to fully document and analyze the ceramic vessels from the region of Coquimbo, studying their material composition and recurring visual iconography, which is still found today in contemporary pottery production. The visit to the collection also allowed Vicente to identify two new Diaguita-Kakán ceramics (Am1939,08.34 & Am1939,08.44), which correspondingly come from the Coquimbo region and originally were part of the Cruz Montt collection.  

This visit was a turning point in the project delivery, as it created the research material for the next stages of work around the collection and new visits by community members from the Limarí province which will take place at the end of the year. The next steps of the project contemplate the circulation of the information collected by Vicente with the local potters, Lasta Anku Association, and community partners to develop new insights that we’ll share soon.

Archaeological sherds found in Combarbalá, Limarí, Chile. Photo: Lasta Anku Association.

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