| This dissertation concerns a history of ancient Peruvian textiles created with the use of the discontinuous warp and weft (DWW) technique between 300 B.C.E. and 1540 C.E. A sample of 268 textiles was assembled from collections in South America, Europe, Canada, and the United States. This unique technology, an ancient Peruvian innovation, produces a flexible patterned plain-weave cloth in which the warps and wefts are equal, visible partners. Significantly, this arduous technique was not developed at any other time in the history of weaving worldwide.; In ancient Peru, DWW textiles appear in general to have been reserved for ritual use, funerary rites in particular, throughout much of their 1800-year history. All textiles were primary forms of artistic expression and communication for the oral and highly visual cultures of the ancient Central Andes, identifying regional affiliation, culture, sex, and social rank. Those textiles destined for ritual use, however, including vestments, head coverings, carrying cloths, shrouds, tomb and temple hangings, and offerings, were encoded with more profound messages about the ideal order and nature of the universe. It is argued that although all ritual textiles in ancient Peru were certainly multivalent, DWW textiles shared at least one common message, the paired principles of balance and reciprocity. These inseparable principles, expressed by the single word ayni in Quechua (the language of the Inka and traditional present-day highlanders), directed all material and spiritual relationships in the ancient Andes and were viewed as absolutely essential to the health of the cosmos. Today they can be read as visual metaphors in the structure, formal elements, and iconography of DWW textiles.; The worldview that generated these and other ancient Central Andean cosmological principles and concepts, including consubstantiality and the interconnectedness of all things, was shamanic in nature. Thus, the inspiration for the compositions of DWW textiles as ritual cloth, like their conceptual content, can be seen as derived from shamanic practices; i.e., transformation rites and visionary experiences. With this project, therefore, I seek to move the general study of ancient Andean textiles beyond description toward use, context, and interpretation. |
