Ancient Andean Textiles

This article includes publications on the yarns, fabrics, and textiles produced for millennia in the Andes before the 16th-century European invasion. The geographical coverage is from Colombia in the north as far as northern Chile and northwestern Argentina in the south. Textile scholars often distinguish between fabrics and textiles. The former term is more encompassing and includes nonwoven cloth, such as felt or constructions made with a single element such as looping. Textiles, on the other hand, are the outcome of regularly interlacing a vertical set of elements, the warp, with a horizontal one, the weft, in a pliable plane of interacting threads. In the form of garments, regalia, bags, wall hangings, and funerary offerings, pre-Hispanic fabrics and textiles from the Andes can be spectacular, in both visual appearance and technique. A particularly long record exists of extremely well preserved examples, including a large number of complete garments, conserved due to the aridity of Andean deserts and the freezing conditions at 6,000 meters above sea level, where mountaintop shrines are encountered. The iconographic range is impressive—from naturalistic renditions of the creatures and beings of this and other cosmological worlds to highly abstract and geometric forms of expression. Some Andean visual imagery characteristically refers to yarn and fabric construction, whether it be plying yarn or looping, twining, or braiding cloth. In this sense, to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s well-used coinage, “the medium is the message.” This interest in the visual characteristics of the medium precedes the introduction of record-keeping by means of the khipu or chinu, the Quechua and Aymara terms for what, in Spanish, is called quipu (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies article “Quipu”). Scholars have therefore explored the significance of textiles, sometimes using as a premise that Andean textiles encode culturally meaningful information in an analogous manner to the storing of information in the knots of a khipu. Such characteristics have led to the publications included here, in which the authors pay attention both to concepts of structure, construction, and process in the production of yarn and fabrics as well as to the visual expression of iconographic themes.