Trarilonko

The trarilonko binds the head: in daily life, a woven woolen band; in festive dress, a silver form — chains of plates with pendant coins framing the face. It belongs to the documented silver ensemble that includes chaway earrings, the trapelakucha pectoral and the tüpu pin that fastens the küpam at the shoulder.

Museum collections date most surviving silver to the ethnographic period, roughly 1880–1910 — the flowering of rütran, Mapuche silverwork, when coin silver acquired in trade was reworked by rütrafe, specialist silversmiths, into an art now emblematic of Mapuche identity.

Trarilonko and the wider silver tradition remain in use — worn at ceremony and celebration, remade by contemporary rütrafe, studied and collected. In the Museo Precolombino's recent catalogue work, silversmiths and weavers co-wrote the documentation of these pieces: the objects are treated as living memory, not silent artefacts. That is the standard this page aspires to.