High Roads/Low Roads, North Roads/South Roads:
Regional and Cultural 'Personalities' in Central and Southern Andean Textiles
This session will explore the "personalities" present in textiles of central and southern Andean cultures. Specifically, papers will identify regional or cultural preferences in the selection of materials (fibers and dyes, for instance), methods of production (direction of spin and ply of fibers, for example), fabric structures, technologies, garment forms and construction, or decorative imagery. What might these preferences employed in the production of cloth reveal about the economies, trade networks, organization of labor, transmission of knowledge, or worldviews of the cultures in question? What does the textile record tell us about cultural contact within and beyond individual regions, and about continuity and disjunction through time?
The panel includes six presenters plus a discussant. Papers were selected based on their relevance to the above theme, but also with diversity in mind: 1) the textiles from six different cultural traditions represent early (Siguas, Paracas, Topará), middle (Moche), and late (Chachapoya, Inca) time periods; and 2) these traditions represent a broad geographical range within the Andes, including those from the highlands as well as the coast, and from the northern, central and southern regions. Several papers present newly excavated and analyzed textiles, adding important new data to the field.
Chair: Anne Paul
Anne Paul received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas, Austin, specializing in pre-Hispanic Central Andean cultures. She has published books and numerous articles on the textiles affliated with the Paracas/Topará cultural tradition of south coastal Peru. Her book Paracas Ritual Attire: Symbols of Authority in Ancient Peru is an analysis of the iconography of the textiles in two funerary bundles. Other recent studies focus on the following aspects of the embroideries: the organization of work (both the stitching of figures and the dyeing of embroidery threads), the use of a combinatorial logic to arrange colors, and the underlying symmetry structures employed in the layout of the embroidered motifs. She has taught at several universities, and currently lives and works in France, where she is a member of Laboratoire "Techniques et culture", Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.
Discussant: Margaret Young-Sánchez
Margaret Young-Sánchez earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology at Yale University, as well as master’s and doctoral degrees in art history at Columbia University. Her specialty is the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica and Andean South America, and she has published on Aztec, Teotihuacan and Maya art, as well as Andean textiles. Her textile research has concentrated on Peru’s central coast (Chancay and Ancón), and Tiwanaku. From 1989-1999, she curated the pre-Columbian, Native American, African and Oceanic collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is presently curator of pre-Columbian art at the Denver Art Museum, and director of the Jan and Frederick Mayer Center for pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art. She is currently organizing an exhibition on the art of Tiwanaku scheduled to open at the Denver Art Museum in 2004, and travel to three additional venues.