BENJAMIN ALBERTI: To us, masking is very much a theatrical performance, it’s about being somebody else, or pretending to be something else. I’ve held one up and you can’t see out of it because the eye holes don’t match up with your eye holes. So, they clearly weren’t being used to wear.

JOSÉ MARÍA YAZPIK (NARRATOR): These striking, expressive stone masks were created by people who lived in what is now northwest Argentina. Masks of this kind have been discovered in burial contexts. You can see holes on the outer edges of the masks, which might have been used to tie them onto funerary bundles.

Benjamin Alberti, Professor of Anthropology at Framingham State University.

BENJAMIN ALBERTI: This was a mask that transformed the person into one of the ancestral dead. Another way to look at it, maybe it is about revealing something that is there rather than masking something. So maybe the masks worked to bring out the ancestral qualities in that dead person as they continue their journey in the afterlife.

JOSÉ MARÍA YAZPIK: Notice that the eyes of the masks are left open, empty.

BENJAMIN ALBERTI: In Amazonian thought, staring, wide eyes are a sign that you cannot see… they’re a sign that you cannot see the invisible, which would be the spirits, other beings within the world. So, to present your mask with wide eyes that are hollow could be playing on this idea that the dead cannot see or the dead should not see. Perhaps is not able to see the living who remain, and so is not able to get involved, not able to cause problems for the living. So, it could be a form of limiting the capacities of that person, once they are dead.

So this really calls attention to the fact that these were objects that were designed to do things.