The Museo de Metales Preciosos Precolombinos (Museum of Pre-Columbian Precious Metals) is on Calle Jaén, the best-preserved colonial street in La Paz, and it occupies one of the old whitewashed houses along the block. The collection focuses on metalwork from the cultures that preceded and surrounded the Inca: Tiwanaku objects in gold and bronze, ornaments and ritual figures, tools and weapons. The craftsmanship is remarkable in ways that photographs do not capture — the weight and finish of the objects, the precision of the casting, the scale of things made without industrial tools.
The displays explain what is understood about how these objects were made and what they were used for, which is more than you might expect given how little written record the pre-Columbian cultures left. There is a genuine curatorial intelligence here; this is not just cases of treasure but an attempt to explain a civilisation through what it valued and made. It sits well alongside Calle Jaén's other small museums — the street has four in total, all within a hundred metres of each other, so a morning on Jaén is a decent introduction to the colonial and pre-colonial history of the region.