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Dozens of rare Pacific Northwest artifacts are believed destroyed in the fire that tore through a museum in Brazil on Sunday, says a University of B.C. curator.

Karen Duffek, a curator at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology and expert in Pacific Northwest artifacts, says one of the 42 Pacific Northwest pieces lost when the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro burned down Sunday was a set of wooden armour made by Indigenous people on the North Coast.

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“The set of armour, which is made out of wooden slats and a kind of twine or cordage, and painted, probably dates to the late 1700s,” she said.

Research had not likely been done to determine the lineage of the warrior who once owned the armour, said Duffek, calling the artifact “quite a rare thing.”

A Russian consul sent the armour to the Portuguese royal family as a gift in the early 1800s, she said, and from there it found its way to the museum in Rio de Janeiro.

Destruction of the piece is a “huge loss,” she added.