Julio C. Tello Site Museum

The Julio C. Tello Site Museum, inside the Paracas National Reserve, is a small museum dedicated to the Paracas culture — the people who inhabited this desert coast between roughly 900 BCE and 100 CE. The Paracas culture is known primarily through its extraordinary textiles: embroidered cloths with complex geometric and figurative designs in vivid colours, used to wrap the dead in elaborate burial bundles.

The museum has a modest collection of artifacts from excavations in the reserve, including pottery, textile fragments, and material relating to the burial practices of the Paracas culture. It is not a large museum, but it provides useful context before or after exploring the peninsula landscape where these people lived. The site of the Wari Kayan necropolis, where Tello made his most important discoveries, is a short distance away.

Tours of the reserve typically pass through the museum; independent visitors can also reach it by private taxi from Paracas town. Entry is included in the reserve admission fee.

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A story
Julio C. Tello was the Peruvian archaeologist who first excavated the Paracas culture sites in the 1920s, unearthing the famous Paracas textiles — extraordinary woven cloths of such complexity and colour that they rewrote what scholars thought was possible in pre-Columbian textile production. Tello, the son of a peasant from Huarochirí who became Peru's greatest archaeologist, named the culture after the peninsula. The museum named for him sits at the site of one of his original excavations.