This book is a complex assemblage that brings together dissimilar essays, images and objects, which, when brought together in this body of paper, intends to represent the more than four decades of the trajectory of the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino. Its internal structure is made up of three autonomous and complementary systems that have the same hierarchy in the final conformation of the work. One of them is a text written in the form of an essay divided into seven sequential chapters that serve as a skeleton of the conceptual, thematic and historical content of the story. Another parallel system is a visual and reasoned catalogue of 62 of the most emblematic pre-Columbian and ethnographic art objects from Native American cultures that the Museum currently safeguards, separated into three large groups that are interspersed throughout the volume and in between the written chapters. Finally, anchoring texts and objects, the book includes six interludes of images of different nature that both mark and guide the visual route for a biography of collecting through fragments of the history of the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino itself.