Browse Items (254 total)

High-status headwear was always the prerogative of the elites in ancient Andean societies. In the Wari Empire, the pre-Inka state that dominated much of the Central Andes ca. 600–1000 AD, officials wore small, four-sided hats that sat high on their…

This tiny bit of a very fine tapestry is all that is left from a Tiwanaku-style textile dating to around 600 AD. It features a human arm and hand grasping some kind of a staff, facing right. It was once connected to a very complex body with wings and…

The Spanish destroyed as much Inka art and culture as possible during the invasion and colonization, melting down the precious metals and burning the royal mummies. Despite this, they admired Inka textiles, as Pizarro’s secretary Francisco de Xeres…

The Inka category of qumpi, or highest-status cloth, included elaborate objects that nevertheless fulfilled various functions, from combs to slings such as this, created and used primarily for warfare. Made with brightly colored camel hair thread and…

Tiny rows of birds adorn this very special, yet useable comb. The weaver used the tines as the warps. Unwoven tines go through the hair, but also simulate fringe on a textile. Here the colors feature the typical Chancay palette of soft golds, pinks,…

Like the fragments of hummingbirds, this technically unique three-dimensional embroidery was stitched on the south coast of Perú around 200 AD. Originally, like the hummingbirds, these bean people were attached as borders to a plain-woven cloth…

Qumpi, what the Inka called cloth made as well as humanly possible, is a deeply Andean category of clothing. Function, such as this being a man’s shirt, was not seen as opposite of what we may call art, the most skilled, aesthetic, intentional, and…

These fragments of an innovative and unique technique date to ca. 200 AD and were made by the Nasca. They originally belonged to the same mantle, but ended up in two different university museum collections: Emory’s (the larger fragment) and Duke’s…

Tinku, the way that two things can come together to produce a third, is a key Quechua concept. While the rows of tiny woven monkey motifs on the piece at left, barely an inch tall each, are very charming and impressive, they are out of place…

Indigenous Amerindian clothing has almost always been woven to shape or constructed from complete parts united in the final garment without recourse to cutting the cloth. This ancient textile, which could have had many other pieces sewn alongside…