Peru · Wood / Hardstone Carving
Mate burilado; mate (from Quechua "mati," a drinking cup or vessel; the Incas called the gourd "puru")
An engraving and pyrographic technique applied to the dried shell of the calabash gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), in which artisans incise fine narrative scenes with a hand tool called a buril, then darken and highlight the carved lines through burning, ash-rubbing, or dye immersion. Archaeologically documented from carved gourd fragments 3,500 years old, found at Huaca Prieta on Peru's north coast, the tradition's living center today is Cochas Chico and Cochas Grande, two small communities in the Mantaro Valley outside Huancayo, where local farmer and muleteer Luis Vilca developed a distinctive, darker burning style using quinual wood that differentiated Cochas mates from the neighboring Ayacucho tradition. Declared Peruvian national Cultural Patrimony in 2013, the craft was famously described by celebrated Peruvian writer José María Arguedas — who visited Cochas artisans in Huancayo's Plaza Constitución in 1964 — as the "round books" of Andean identity.
Risk level: Vulnerable · Not UNESCO-inscribed; declared Peruvian national Cultural Patrimony (Patrimonio Cultural de la Nación) in 2013
The making of khipus: cords of spun and plied cotton or camelid (llama, alpaca) fiber, tied together and knotted to record information.
A three-dimensional narrative box sculpture from Ayacucho, Peru, descended from colonial-era portable missionary altar boxes and transformed into a distinct popular-art form by Joaquín López Antay (1897–1981), the first Peruvian craftsman…
A hand-thrown and hand-burnished pottery tradition from Chulucanas, Piura region, on Peru's northern coast, reviving the pre-Columbian Vicús culture's (c.
A pre-Hispanic Quechua textile tradition centered on Chinchero, in Cusco's Sacred Valley, in which women hand-spin alpaca, llama, and sheep wool on a drop spindle, dye it using entirely natural insect, plant, and mineral sources, and weave…
A narrative painted-wood-plank tradition from Sarhua, Víctor Fajardo province, Ayacucho, in which relatives and godparents gift a family newly finishing a house with a two-to-three-meter wooden board painted with the household's genealogy,…
An intricate, individually composed geometric design system applied by Shipibo-Konibo women of Peru's central Amazon (along the Ucayali River, centered around Pucallpa) to hand-coiled pottery, hand-woven and hand-painted cotton textiles,…
The carving of wood into architectural ornament, devotional statuary, and household ritual objects — one of the Khmer 'principal crafts' alongside weaving, silver- and goldsmithing, and stone sculpture, according to standard art-historical…
Kim Sin (金身, literally "golden body" in Hokkien) is the Singapore Chinese craft of hand-carving and restoring wooden statues of Taoist deities for temple worship — a permanent devotional object, carved and painted piece by piece, distinct…
The wood carving tradition of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, whose distinct language, religion, and culture remain separate from Japan's own — traditionally the domain of Ainu men, who carved…
The carving of the tanoa — the broad, shallow, multi-legged wooden bowl used to mix and serve yaqona (kava), described in Fijian craft literature as the single most important object within Fijian wood carving and central to the kava…
The hand-carving of ordinary bars of natural soap into delicate, lifelike flowers using only a few small knives — a technique that developed directly out of Thailand's much older tradition of fruit and vegetable carving, itself more than…
The carving of elaborate wooden funerary sculptures — among the most technically complex carvings documented anywhere in Oceanic art — created for malagan, a complex, months-or-years-in-preparation series of memorial ceremonies held in…