Omichicahuaztli dalla Mesoamerica: studio comparativo delle pratiche museali di conservazione e valorizzazione fra Italia e Messico

Roma, Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico “Luigi Pigorini”. Exhibition room “Americas”. Two worked human bones occupy the bottom right corner of the glass case dedicated to human sacrifice, sharing space with other Mesoamerican archaeological objects that refer to the same subject. The corresponding label describes them as two musical instruments. But what are these two items, really? How were they made and used by the culture to which they belonged? Since we are dealing with musical instruments, albeit of a distant past, can we try to play them today to investigate their sound? And moreover, who took them away from their original context? How did they arrive in Europe to be then included in the Roman museum’s collection? In other words: what story are they able to tell us? Thanks to an interdisciplinary approach involving several specialists, it was possible to answer these and other questions regarding both items, using a great variety of sources and disciplines, such as Biology, Paleogenetics, Taphonomy, but also Archaeomusicology, Ethnography and Museology. As a result, we have been able to reconstruct the historical link between the items and the Italian museum highlighting the storytelling abilities inscribed in the materiality of such museum objects, that is, objects with a story to tell.