ICOM International Council of Museums - Museo Estancia Jesuitica ...

ABSTRACT
La historia indigena en museos locales
Alejandra Pupio – Argentina
In this presentation, our aim is to discuss some aspects related to the inclusion of the
indigenous history in local museums from Buenos Aires province, but that can be
extended to other places.
We define local museums as public or private institutions which topics may include
natural science, history as well as art and that acts at the municipal jurisdiction.
Particularly, in this paper, we wil abord the situations of both the first and second kinds,
which include palaeontologic, zoologic, floristic and historic museographic funds that
can be shown toghether as well as apart. The archaeological collections are part of this
kind of institutions.
In Buenos Aires province, since the creation of the first municipal museum in 1872 up
to the end of the1980 decade, one houndred and three museums were opened, forty of
them have archaeological collections. (Table 1) (Education Department 1979). As it
can be observed in the graphic, the archaeological collections have had different
weights in the museum heritage, being less its participation at the 1980 decade. I think
that this could be showing, on one hand, the weight that collectionists had in the
conformation of this institutions´ heritage set, which action marks the entering of the
archaeological collections to the museums (Pupio 2005). On the other hand, since the
1970 decade there has been an important growth of the academic investigations in the
region, situation that have restricted the collectionists action and conducted the
collections to national institutions for study and deposit. In these case we will observe
the characteristics of the regional indigenous history displays at local museums with
collections gathered between the 1940 and 1960 decades, as an important number of
museums show similar properties in the ways in which these materials entered and
were displayed. Studying these kind of institutions allow us, on one hand, to set up the
collections conformation mechanisms as well as the exposition displays used to tell the
regional indigenous history. On the other hand, from a historic perspective, we can
analize the persistance of the original museographics practice, established when these
institutions where created as well as the collections dinamic up to its current situation.
En este documento ponemos a discusión el rol que el pasado indígena posee en el
discurso histórico de museos locales en el ámbito de la provincia de Buenos Aires
(Argentina). En especial, analizaremos la situación de los museos surgidos entre las
décadas de 1940 y 1960, que se caracterizan por un origen común que se tradujo en
un patrón similar de obtención, interpretación y exhibición del patrimonio, dado
también por la figura del coleccionista/autodidacta, encargada de la conformación de
las colecciones de estas instituciones.
Un número importante de museos locales poseen colecciones arqueológicas reunidas
por coleccionistas en el período observado y que han sido exhibidas en las
exposiciones permanentes de esas instituciones. Los materiales eran expuestos en
vitrinas que mostraban una sucesión de elementos agrupados por su morfología,
materia prima y tamaño, generalmente en las salas de acceso al museo. Estas
estrategias museográficas no tenían en cuenta los contextos de hallazgo ni las
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