Why embroidery? An answer from the ancient Andes

by

Anne Paul

 

Though perfectly capable of executing a variety of fabric structures and decorative techniques, the ancient weavers who participated in the Paracas/Topará cultural tradition on the south coast of Peru overwhelmingly preferred stem stitch embroidery on plain weave. In a sample of over 1200 Paracas Necrópolis-style fabrics, 990 have embroidered designs.  Furthermore, an additional 72 solid-color plain weaves that are undecorated may have been destined for embroidery work but were buried before having been finished.  Why did Paracas/Topará weavers choose embroidery 8 1/2 times out of ten when making a fabric?  Why did they choose such a simple structure when technical virtuosity was not only highly prized within the Andean world but also within their easy reach?

 

Embroidery is not exclusively identified with Paracas Necrópolis-style textiles within the ancient Andean world, but no other pre-Hispanic culture came close to exploiting its particular advantages.  These advantages include ease of arranging large numbers of figures in a field or in borders, as well as the possibility of stitching minutely-detailed images in a seemingly unlimited number of different color combinations.  I submit that one reason for the primacy of this simple structure within Paracas/Topará culture was that the flexibility permitted by stitching images on cloth rather than weaving them into the structure of the textile facilitated the creation of complexities of a different nature: it enabled weavers to embed conceptual ideas in cloth. I also explore the possibility that the use of embroidery was linked to a mode of manufacture in which numerous persons, rather than one individual, worked on a single fabric.