Women Smiths: Unsettling Archaeological and Museums Narratives of Pre-1492 Andean Goldsmithing. The Jama Coaque ‘Goldsmiths’ Ceramic Female Figurines of Coastal Ecuador

TY - CONF

T1 - Women Smiths: Unsettling Archaeological and Museums Narratives of Pre-1492 Andean Goldsmithing.

T2 - EDGES: Entangling Indigenous Knowledges in Universities

AU - Ferraro, Emilia

PY - 2026/7/10

Y1 - 2026/7/10

N2 - This talk addresses how museum collections and exhibition practices have contributed to the silencing of women’s roles in pre-Hispanic Andean metallurgy. It invites curators to reconsider how gendered assumptions are embedded in cataloguing systems, interpretive texts, and display narratives. Museums have often displayed Andean metalwork in ways that decontextualise these objects from Indigenous cosmologies, gender relations, and sacred practices. While exhibitions frequently acknowledge the spiritual significance of metals in Andean worlds (Falchetti 2018), they rarely explore how such sacred relationships were mediated through gendered bodies and labour. As a result, women’s connections to metallurgy – as both technical and ritual practice – remain obscured. Feminist archaeology has demonstrated that the tacit attribution of tasks only to male artisans often reflects modern disciplinary assumptions rather than archaeological certainty (e.g. Gero 1991). This talk extends that critique to museum interpretations, suggesting that androcentric narratives have been normalised through exhibition conventions while also reproducing colonial hierarchies of knowledge (Smith 1999; Quijano 2000). Central to this (inevitably speculative) argument is the rereading of a large collection of Jama Coaque ceramic figurines from coastal Ecuador (c. 350 B.C.E. – 1531 C.E.) depicting seated women holding boxlike containers filled with objects resembling metal jewellery. Such figurines have previously been interpreted through Eurocentric frameworks that emphasise marital symbolism and reproductive status (Gutierrez Usillo, 2012: 222). Alongside feminist reassessments of iconography and material culture that have emphasised the importance of display juxtapositions in shaping knowledge (Meskell 1999), I propose that these figurines suggest women’s active engagement with metal objects – as makers, custodians, and ritual specialists – rather than merely as passive users, thereby troubling the deeply entrenched association between metallurgy and male expertise. In doing so, the talk situates itself within broader efforts in museum anthropology to decolonise collections, challenge inherited hierarchies of value, and restore complexity to Indigenous pasts. It questions how museum taxonomies, display logics, and disciplinary conventions reproduce colonial and androcentric histories of knowledge. It also demonstrates how re-examining museum holdings through feminist and decolonial lenses can unsettle dominant narratives and open alternative understandings of gender, technology, and the sacred in pre-Hispanic Andean societies and beyond. The talk concludes by advocating for epistemic transformations rather than additive inclusions, calling for a reconfiguration of how museums and archaeology conceptualise gender, labour, and the sacred.

AB - This talk addresses how museum collections and exhibition practices have contributed to the silencing of women’s roles in pre-Hispanic Andean metallurgy. It invites curators to reconsider how gendered assumptions are embedded in cataloguing systems, interpretive texts, and display narratives. Museums have often displayed Andean metalwork in ways that decontextualise these objects from Indigenous cosmologies, gender relations, and sacred practices. While exhibitions frequently acknowledge the spiritual significance of metals in Andean worlds (Falchetti 2018), they rarely explore how such sacred relationships were mediated through gendered bodies and labour. As a result, women’s connections to metallurgy – as both technical and ritual practice – remain obscured. Feminist archaeology has demonstrated that the tacit attribution of tasks only to male artisans often reflects modern disciplinary assumptions rather than archaeological certainty (e.g. Gero 1991). This talk extends that critique to museum interpretations, suggesting that androcentric narratives have been normalised through exhibition conventions while also reproducing colonial hierarchies of knowledge (Smith 1999; Quijano 2000). Central to this (inevitably speculative) argument is the rereading of a large collection of Jama Coaque ceramic figurines from coastal Ecuador (c. 350 B.C.E. – 1531 C.E.) depicting seated women holding boxlike containers filled with objects resembling metal jewellery. Such figurines have previously been interpreted through Eurocentric frameworks that emphasise marital symbolism and reproductive status (Gutierrez Usillo, 2012: 222). Alongside feminist reassessments of iconography and material culture that have emphasised the importance of display juxtapositions in shaping knowledge (Meskell 1999), I propose that these figurines suggest women’s active engagement with metal objects – as makers, custodians, and ritual specialists – rather than merely as passive users, thereby troubling the deeply entrenched association between metallurgy and male expertise. In doing so, the talk situates itself within broader efforts in museum anthropology to decolonise collections, challenge inherited hierarchies of value, and restore complexity to Indigenous pasts. It questions how museum taxonomies, display logics, and disciplinary conventions reproduce colonial and androcentric histories of knowledge. It also demonstrates how re-examining museum holdings through feminist and decolonial lenses can unsettle dominant narratives and open alternative understandings of gender, technology, and the sacred in pre-Hispanic Andean societies and beyond. The talk concludes by advocating for epistemic transformations rather than additive inclusions, calling for a reconfiguration of how museums and archaeology conceptualise gender, labour, and the sacred.

KW - Ancient Metallurgy

KW - Ecuador

KW - Women

UR - https://edges.fcsh.unl.pt/symposium-unsettling-the-museum-thinking-through-indigenous-entanglaments-st-andrews-8-10-july-2026/

M3 - Paper

Y2 - 8 July 2026 through 10 July 2026

ER -