Textiles, Technical Practice and Power in the Andes

This book explores issues around the production of cloth in the Andean region and its use in Andean societies. Where possible, the book focuses on Andean textiles from a weaver’s point of view, through the various tasks and processes in their making, and the manifold ways in which the ideas about a finished textile product refer back continually to these prior processes. Recent intellectual developments on the productive chain of weaving are taken into account, specifically on the human dimension of this in the operative chain (chaîne opératoire) of the textile domain. By working from the productive chain backwards, it is possible to trace and define the processes which led to the material makeup of a certain piece. In this way it is possible to make more convincing links between the materials or colors used during the productive processes and the finished museum object. Contents: List of abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Editors’ note on orthography; Introduction: Denise Y. Arnold; Part I – Andean textiles as cultural records, and issues in their documentation; 1.Textiles, knotted khipus, and a semiosis in common: Towards a woven language of documentation in the Andes – Denise Y. Arnold; 2. Practice and meaning in spiral-wrapped batons and cords from Cerrillos, a Late Paracas site in the Ica Valley, Peru– Jeffrey Splitstoser; 3. Andean calendrical knowledge in the royal tunics called tarco huallca: Inca, Huari and Tiahuanaco tunics read as fourfold almanacs – R. T. Zuidema; Part II- Andean textiles, technology and material culture: Textile technologies and their social consequences; 4. Paracas Necropolis: Communities of textile production, exchange networks and social boundaries in the Central Andes, 150 BC to AD 250– Ann H. Peters; 5. Weaving the body politic: the integration of technological practice and embodied social identity in the late pre-hispanic Andes – Anne Tiballi; 6. Technical reflections of highland-coastal relationships in late pre-hispanic textiles from Chillon and Chancay – Ann P. Rowe; Part III- Woven techniques, instruments and skilled bodies: being and doing though cloth; 7.Technical competence in weaving as a means of distinction among young Macha women, in Northern Potosí, Bolivia – Cassandra Torrico; 8. Thoughts on productive knowledge in Andean weaving with discontinuous warp and weft– Penelope Dransart; 9.Prehispanic textile production in Highland Bolivia: instruments for spinning and weaving processes – Claudia Rivera Casanovas.