The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino (Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art) is an art museum dedicated to the study and display of pre-Columbian art

Pre-Columbian art

Pre-Columbian art is the visual arts of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, North, Central, and South Americas until the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and the time period marked by Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas....

works and artefacts from Central

Central America

Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...

 and South America

South America

South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...

. The museum is located in the city centre of Santiago

Santiago, Chile

Santiago , also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile, and the center of its largest conurbation . It is located in the country's central valley, at an elevation of above mean sea level...

, the capital of Chile

Chile

Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...

. The museum was founded by the prominent Chilean architect and antiquities collector Sergio Larraín García-Moreno, who had sought premises for the display and preservation of his private collection of pre-Columbian artefacts acquired over the course of nearly fifty years. With the support of Santiago's municipal government

Municipalidad

Municipalidad is a Spanish term for municipality used in many Latin American countries such as Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru and Puerto Rico...

 at the time, García-Moreno secured the building and established the museum's curator

Curator

A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...

ial institution. The museum first opened in December 1981.

Items in the museum's collections are drawn from the major pre-Columbian

Pre-Columbian

The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic period to European colonization during...

 culture areas of Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...

, Intermediate

Intermediate Area

The Intermediate Area is an archaeological geographical area of the Americas that was defined in its clearest form by Gordon R. Willey in his 1971 book An Introduction to American Archaeology, Vol. 2: South America...

 / Isthmo-Colombian

Isthmo-Colombian

The Isthmo-Colombian area is defined as a cultural area encompassing those territories occupied by speakers of the Chibchan languages at the time of European contact...

, Pan-Caribbean

Pan-Caribbean

The concept of a "pan-Caribbean" culture area refers to recent proposals by an international group of archaeologists to the effect that contacts among Pre-Columbian peoples of the Yucatán Peninsula, the Antilles, Central America, and northern South America may have been more extensive than...

, Amazonia and the Andean (central and southern).

External links

• Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, official website