Pathways to the Past: Strategies for investigating Ancient Andean Textiles (original) (raw)
Related papers
Andean Textile Traditions: Material Knowledge and Culture, Part 1
The development of rich and complex Andean textile traditions spanned millennia, in concert with the development of cultures that utilized textiles as a primary form of expression and communication. Understanding the importance of textiles in the Andean world, we can examine elements of their genesis and look at the trajectory from the earliest developments of fiber-made items to the extraordinarily complex and specific processes of textile making, such as warp-wrapping and discontinuous warp and weft weaving. These processes are examined in the context of the relationship between textiles and the sacred, highlighting the significance and agency of cloth in part through the creation of the unique methods of their construction, which constitute systems of knowledge underscored in the material and materiality of the media.
Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, 2021
It is proposed that detailed knowledge of the textile production sequence currently carried out by Aymara weavers of the Altiplano of Tarapac (northern Chile) constitutes an important reference to link material and immaterial aspects and generate indicators with which to address pre-Hispanic textile production in domestic sites, the locations where fabrics would have been produced and used. This research is conceptually framed by the anthropology of technology, which considers material production as a social act. The recording of textile production processes (cha ne op ratoire) was carried out using an ethno-archaeological approach to build a bridge between the present—with known material and immaterial conditions—and the past. Work with contemporary producers allowed us to generate indicators of the different stages of a textile manufacturing sequence related to landscape, particular places, and mobile and immobile material components. These analytic methods were archaeologically ...
Andean weaving instruments for textile planning: the waraña coloured thread-wrapped rods and their pendant cords., 2012
Recent studies on the Andean knotted threads, called khipu, consider their use not only as records of quantity, but also as more general recording and documenting devices, with integral planning aspects. This possibility has been explored in relation to khipus as finished artifacts and as composite objects under construction. However, until now, studies of Andean textiles have tended to restrict their analysis to the semiotically constituted construction of already completed artifacts, with less attention to their relation to this wider administrative domain. Here we consider textiles as part of wider productive networks, in their totalities and their constituent parts. We reconsider some archaeological and historical weaving instruments, called waraña in Aymara, from this point of view, using ethnographic analogies to suggest ways in which these instruments might have been used in the past in these wider planning and administrative systems overseeing textile production.
Woven Brilliance: Approaching Color in Andean Textile Traditions
Textile Museum Journal, 2020
Support for volume 47 of The Textile Museum Journal is generously provided by the Cotsen Textile Traces Study Collection Endowment, David W. and Barbara G. Fraser, and the Markarian Foundation. The museum is grafeful for their support and commitment to advancing textile scholarship.
“Mesoamerican Archaeological Textiles, Materials, Techniques, and Contexts”, 2017
In Mesoamerica, unlike the Andean area, there are few instances when climatic conditions allow the preservation of the organic raw materials constituting ancient fabrics. Examples of such textiles conserved in Mexican museums are quite limited, thus even the tiniest fragments recovered in archaeological contexts greatly augment our understanding of ancient weaving technologies and their use in Mesoamerican societies. Most of the surviving fabrics come from dry caves in northern Mexico, but in recent days the exploration of relatively inaccessible rock shelters in southern Mexico has led to the recovery of additional textiles from early times that are associated with funerary contexts and has expanded the corpus of fabrics woven on backstrap as well as horizontal and stationary looms. The tradition of cremating the dead occasioned the carbonization of clothing during rituals prior to inhumation, and painstaking conservation processes begun after excavation have enabled the analysis of manufacturing techniques and the various weaves employed. Written sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reveal the iconographic and chromatic richness of the fabrics produced around the time that the Spaniards first arrived and the great variety of pigments and dyes used to color them. The development of several archaeometric analytical techniques that require only miniscule samples have enabled us to confirm the use of indigo (Indigofera suffiticosa), cochineal (Dactylopius coccus) or achiote (Bixa orellana), in archaeological fabrics. This paper will examine the techniques and materials employed by Mesoamerican peoples in examples conserved in the collections of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, which come from various contexts such as dry caves, flooded soils, and ritual cremations.
Weaving Life. The Textile Collection of the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore, La Paz, Bolivia, following the productive chain., 2015
When we started preparing this catalogue, little work has been done in Bolivia on the museological aspects of textiles from the Andean and Amazonian regions of the country, and still less in a contextualised sense, taking into account the social life of its regions. Neither was there an adequate link, within Bolivian archaeology, between museum collections and national research into textiles, and this discipline is only recently showing an interest in this theme. And although there had been certain advances over the past decades within anthropology and the history of art into the study of textiles, this had not produced a renovation of ideas in theory or in practice, applicable to the organisation of textile exhibitions. In the present volume, in coordination with the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore (Musef), in La Paz, we decided to remedy this situation by proposing a new focus towards the woven objects located in the museum deposits, centred on making these textiles within the productive chain of weaving, taking into account the social life of the weaving communities of practice in the region, and also the social life of textiles as both objects and subjects.
Representations of Nature in Andean Textiles
Journal of Global Initiatives Policy Pedagogy Perspective, 2013
Andean textile tradition is rich with symbolism demonstrating the close ties of Quechua speaking people of Peru with nature. The observations of several researchers and textile production centers bear witness to the fascinating world of Andean cosmology as it is expressed in traditional cloth. This article introduces many of these important ideas, people, and organizations to the reader.
Reconstructing Ancient Technology - the Analysis of Pre-Columbian Ecuadorian Textiles
2000
Ancient civilizations of South America constructed textiles that reflected their culture. In ancient Ecuador, the people of the Guangala cultural phase (500 BC - AD 800) left no recorded history. Archaeologists have uncovered pottery sherds with impressions of textiles. With high resolution microscopy and comparison to modern Ecuadorian textiles, scientists can reconstruct the ancient textile structure. Upon additional analysis it
Mesoamerican Archaeological Textiles: An Overview of Materials, Techniques, and Contexts
Zea Books
In Mesoamerica, unlike the Andean area, there are few instances when climatic conditions allow the preservation of the organic raw materials constituting ancient fabrics. Examples of such textiles conserved in Mexican museums are quite limited, thus even the tiniest fragments recovered in archaeological contexts greatly augment our understanding of ancient weaving technologies and their use in Mesoamerican societies. Most of the surviving fabrics come from dry caves in northern Mexico, but in recent days the exploration of relatively inaccessible rock shelters in southern Mexico has led to the recovery of additional textiles from early times that are associated with funerary contexts and has expanded the corpus of fabrics woven on backstrap as well as horizontal and stationary looms. The tradition of cremating the dead occasioned the carbonization of clothing during rituals prior to inhumation, and painstaking conservation processes begun after excavation have enabled the analysis of manufacturing techniques and the various weaves employed. Written sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reveal the iconographic and chromatic richness of the fabrics produced around the time that the Spaniards first arrived and the great variety of pigments and dyes used to color them. The development of several archaeometric analytical techniques that require only miniscule samples have enabled us to confirm the use of indigo (Indigofera suffiticosa), cochineal (Dactylopius coccus) or achiote (Bixa orellana), in archaeological fabrics. This paper will examine the techniques and materials employed by Mesoamerican peoples in examples conserved in the collections of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, which come from various contexts such as dry caves, flooded soils, and ritual cremations.