Amazonian Legacies: Art and Archaeology

You step into a room where jaguars and piranhas painted on Colombian cliffs are projected around you to a soundscape. They come from Chiribiquete, a UNESCO site the museum calls the "Sistine Chapel of the Ancients", and the installation is as close as most people will get to rock art deep in the rainforest.

The rest of the show argues that the Amazon was never untouched wilderness. People have lived there for at least 13,000 years, and the evidence here is painted funerary urns from Brazil, rare cacao bottles from Ecuador and a laser-scan map of a settlement hidden under the forest. Body painting and jewellery connect those finds to communities living there now. Before Sprüngli, Ecuador already had dedicated cacao bottles.

No reviews have appeared yet. Tickets are CHF 18 (CHF 14 reduced), free for under-16s, and the museum stays open until 8pm on Thursdays.