Gold hammered over the dead.
Inka · In · ka
Cast by hand · Painted by you
Inka · Peru
Royal mummies were brought to feasts and asked their opinion. The masks were made so the dead could keep a face.
The famous Andean gold masks are mostly pre-Inca. The tradition runs through three cultures on the north coast of Peru: the Moche from around 100 CE, the Sicán or Lambayeque from about 750, and the Chimú after them.
Gold was valued because it does not corrode. Putting it over a dead ruler's face was not a display of wealth, it was an argument that he was not finished. The scholar Paloma Carcedo de Mufarech describes it as prized for incorruptibility rather than as a medium of exchange.
Andean goldsmiths hammered sheet rather than casting it, working the metal thin over moulds and joining it without solder wherever they could manage. Tumbaga, a gold and copper alloy, did most of the heavy lifting.
Funerary mask, Sicán culture · Metropolitan Museum
The Lord of Sipán, a Moche noble buried around 250 CE, was found intact in 1987 by the archaeologist Walter Alva. It was the first undisturbed royal tomb ever excavated in the Americas, and he is usually introduced as the Tutankhamun of this hemisphere.
Sicán burials have turned up as many as five masks in a single grave. The faces are stylised rather than individual, with winged almond eyes that always look slightly upward.
Many were finished in cinnabar, sometimes bound with blood, so what reads as bright gold in a display case was originally a deep blood red laid over the metal. Museums tend to show you the gold because the red has mostly gone.
Nasca mask · Cleveland Museum of Art
The Inca themselves put the weight on the ancestors rather than the mask. Mallquis, the preserved royal mummies, were dressed, carried in procession, seated at feasts and consulted on decisions.
Masking did not stop with the conquest. It went sideways into Inti Raymi, into the Oruro carnival, into the pilgrimage at Qoyllur Rit'i, where devils and bears and the sun still come down the same streets every year.
That is the longest continuous conversation between the living and the dead any of these eight traditions can claim.
Gold was valued because it does not corrode. Putting it on a dead ruler's face was an argument that he was not finished.
Ours is plaster, so the beaten-sheet quality is sculpted rather than hammered. The nose, the winged eyes and the ear discs are all raised.
Museums show you gold because the cinnabar wore off. Put the red back on and you are closer to what was actually buried.
Mask Nº 08 · Peru · 2027
Inca
Gold hammered over the dead.
Premium plaster, one at a time, in the house on the Siem Reap River.
No colour. The sculpt is the guide: raised edges catch the brush and hold it where it belongs.
Museums show you the gold because the red has worn off. Put the red back on and you are closer to what was buried.
Mask per box
Pots of colour
One mask, five pots of colour, one real brush, a story card. Nestled in a foam tray inside a coloured box. Every mask in the collection ships the same way.
Cast by hand in premium plaster at the house in Siem Reap. Every carved line of the original is there in relief before a brush touches it.
Water-based colour, non-toxic, off a table with a damp cloth. The five change per mask to match the tradition it comes from.
Real fibre, real spring. The kind you keep in the pencil pot long after the mask is finished and on a shelf.
What the mask is in its own tradition, before we cast a copy in plaster and sent it out white.
Yes. Water-based, non-toxic, and it comes off skin and off a table with a damp cloth. Built for a kitchen table on a Sunday.
A story card with the history and the traditional colours, so you know what you are looking at. No paint-by-numbers. The mask ships white on purpose.
Resin is cheaper to ship and it feels like a phone case. Plaster takes paint properly, keeps a sharp edge on every carved line, and has the weight that puts a thing on a shelf instead of in a drawer.
Inca arrives in 2027. We will not put a month against it until the moulds are cut and the first run is right.
Yes, and we would like that. Minimum order is one case of four, prepaid, and you can collect from the office in Siem Reap if that suits you better than freight. Full pricing and terms sit behind a trade login. Write to us with the name of the shop and we will send a code the same day.
Inca lands in 2027. Leave your email and you will know the day it does.