W
hen the Inka first encountered the Spanish conquistadors,
they were puzzled by the Europeans’ fixation on gold and
silver. The Inka valued finely woven cloth just as highly as precious
metal. Textiles and clothing dominated every aspect of their exis-
tence. Storing textiles in great warehouses, their leaders demanded
cloth as tribute, gave it as gifts, exchanged it during diplomatic nego-
tiations, and even burned it as a sacrificial offering. Although both
men and women participated in cloth production, the Inka rulers
selected the best women weavers from around the empire and se-
questered them for life to produce textiles exclusively for the elite.
Andean weavers manufactured their textiles by spinning into
yarn the cotton grown in five different shades on the warm coast and
the fur sheared from highland llamas, alpacas, vicuñas, or guanacos,
and then weaving the yarn into cloth. Rare tropical bird feathers and
small plaques of gold and silver were sometimes sewn onto cloth
destined for the nobility. Andean weavers mastered nearly every tex-
tile technique known today, many executed with a simple device
known as a backstrap loom.Similar looms are still in use in the An-
des. The weavers stretch the long warp (vertical) threads between
two wooden bars. The top bar is tied to an upright. A belt or back-
strap, attached to the bottom bar, encircles the waist of the seated
weaver, who maintains the tension of the warp threads by leaning
back. The weaver passes the weft (horizontal) threads over and un-
der the warps and pushes them tightly against each other to produce
the finished cloth. In ancient textiles, the sturdy cotton often formed
the warp, and the wool, which can be dyed brighter colors, served to
create complex designs in the weft.Embroidery,the sewing of threads
onto a finished ground cloth to form contrasting designs, was the
specialty of the Paracas culture (FIG. 14-20).
The dry deserts of coastal Peru have preserved not only numer-
ous textiles from different periods but also hundreds of finely
worked baskets containing spinning and weaving implements. These
tools are invaluable sources of information about Andean textile
production processes. The baskets found in documented contexts
came from women’s graves, attesting to the close identity between
weaving and women, the reverence for the cloth-making process,
and the Andean belief that textiles were necessary in the afterlife.
A special problem all weavers confront is that they must visualize
the entire design in advance and cannot easily change it during the
weaving process. No records exist of how Andean weavers learned,
retained, and passed on the elaborate patterns they wove into cloth,
but some painted ceramics depict weavers at work, apparently copy-
ing designs from finished models. However, the inventiveness of indi-
vidual weavers is evident in the endless variety of colors and patterns
in surviving Andean textiles. This creativity often led Andean artists
to design textiles that are highly abstract and geometric. Paracas em-
broideries (FIG. 14-20), for example, may depict humans, down to the
patterns on the tunics they wear, yet the figures are reduced to their
essentials in order to focus on their otherworldly role. The culmina-
tion of this tendency toward abstraction may be seen in the Wari
compositions (FIG. 14-26) in which figural motifs become stunning
blocks of color that overwhelm the subject matter itself.Andean Weaving
MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES
14-20Embroidered funerary mantle, Paracas, from the southern coast of Peru, first century CE. Plain-weave camelid fiber with
stem-stitch embroidery of camelid wool, 4 77 – 8 7 107 – 8 . Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (William A. Paine Fund).
Outstanding among the Paracas arts are the woven mantles used to wrap the bodies of the dead. The flying or floating figure
repeated endlessly on this mantle is probably either the deceased or a religious practitioner.1 ft.382 Chapter 14 NATIVE ARTS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE 1300