The conservation practices in museums are processes that become an important part of the biography of objects, sometimes altering their record and physical configuration. In this article, we discuss the case of a textile piece deposited at the National Museum of Natural History of Chile (MNHN), which corresponds to a possible skirt or apron from Arica, which came from a local archaeological context from the Inca period. This piece entered the collection over a century ago through a private donation; despite its interventions, we have been able to reconstruct its original configuration through comparative work with other similar specimens, thereby reconstructing its context and cultural assignment.