I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM
Paracas textile
▶ Listen · narrated
In the 1920s a necropolis in Peru yielded 420 mummified bodies wrapped in embroidered textiles. The British Museum examples show flying shamans who hold severed heads by their hair.
At a glance
- Culture
- Paracas
- Date
- 200–300 BCE
- Find
- Necropolis in Peru, 1920s
- Collection
- British Museum
- Type
- Embroidered textile artwork
Look closer
Flying figures, held by the hair
The British Museum examples show airborne figures commonly described as shamans. Each holds a severed head by the hair. The motif is not a faint outline or a later addition; it is worked into the embroidery itself, so the violence and the flight sit in the same stitch-work as the rest of the design.
Cloth as wrapping, not display
These textiles were not made to hang on a wall. They formed part of the wrappings around mummified bodies in a necropolis. What survives in the museum is therefore funerary equipment first: cloth that once enclosed the dead, layer upon layer, before it was ever treated as an artwork.
One necropolis, hundreds of bodies
The textiles come from a single burial ground that held 420 mummified bodies, each wrapped in embroidered cloth of the Paracas culture. The scale matters. The flying figures and severed heads were not a unique commission for one person; they belonged to a shared burial practice repeated across hundreds of individuals.
The story
The Paracas textiles in the British Museum are embroidered cloths made by the Paracas culture of Peru and dated to around 200 to 300 BCE. They are textile artworks, and they are also burial gear. That double identity shapes almost everything that can usefully be said about them.
They were found in the 1920s at a necropolis in Peru. The site held 420 bodies that had been mummified and wrapped in embroidered textiles. The cloths were not incidental coverings. They were part of how the dead were prepared and enclosed. What later entered museum collections had first spent centuries as layers around human remains.
The examples held by the British Museum show flying shamans who hold severed heads by their hair. The image is direct. Figures in flight grip heads; the hair is the handle. Whether every viewer in antiquity would have named these figures shamans is a separate question of interpretation, but the visible subject is plain enough: airborne bodies and severed heads worked into the embroidery.
Who made them is answerable only at the level of culture and practice. They are products of the Paracas culture, made for funerary use, and repeated across a large cemetery population rather than reserved for a single elite burial. The labour of embroidery, the choice of motif, and the decision to wrap the dead in such cloth all belonged to that community’s way of treating death.
How they were found is equally specific and limited. The necropolis was investigated in the 1920s; the textiles came out of that context of mummified, wrapped bodies. Beyond that frame—the culture, the date range, the cemetery count, the museum’s examples and their flying figures—the secure facts thin out. The objects still carry the weight of what is known: embroidered cloth, funerary wrapping, a repeated image of flight and decapitation, and a find that tied hundreds of bodies to the same textile tradition.
Why it mattered then
In their own moment these textiles mattered as part of the apparatus of death. Wrapping 420 mummified bodies in embroidered cloth was not a minor finishing touch; it was a sustained, shared practice. The imagery worked into the cloth—flying figures holding severed heads by the hair—travelled with the dead into the grave. Whatever precise meaning those figures held for Paracas makers and mourners, the textiles show that complex pictorial embroidery belonged inside funerary ritual, not apart from it. Cloth was a medium for both protection and representation at the point of burial.
Why it matters now
They still matter because they preserve a pictorial and technical tradition that would otherwise be almost unreachable. Organic cloth rarely survives; when it does, and when it carries clear embroidered subjects, it offers evidence that stone and ceramic alone cannot. The British Museum examples keep visible a Paracas choice to put flight and severed heads into the wrappings of the dead. They also anchor a larger archaeological fact: a necropolis of hundreds of bodies, each bound up in embroidered textile, dated to around 200 to 300 BCE. That combination of image, material, and cemetery scale continues to shape how the Paracas culture is understood.
The surprising detail
The same cloths that now sit as textile artworks in the British Museum once wrapped mummified bodies—hundreds of them. The flying shamans and the heads gripped by the hair were not gallery subjects. They were stitched into the layers that enclosed the dead in a Peruvian necropolis, and only much later, after the finds of the 1920s, did they become objects of public display.
What is disputed
The figures are widely described as flying shamans, and that wording follows the usual account of the British Museum examples. The identification as shamans is interpretive; what is securely visible is the combination of flight and heads held by the hair. The original full wrapping arrangements on individual bodies cannot be reconstructed from the museum pieces alone.
Remember this
Paracas embroidered textiles wrapped the dead; the British Museum examples still show flying shamans holding severed heads by the hair.
Test yourself
Why does it change our reading of the flying figures to know these cloths were burial wrappings rather than freestanding display pieces?
Because the imagery was not made to be viewed at a distance on a wall. It was stitched into cloth that enclosed mummified bodies, so the flying shamans and severed heads belonged to the intimate, layered space of the grave. The motif was part of how the dead were dressed and contained, repeated across a necropolis of 420 bodies. Treating the textiles only as pictures misses that they were also funerary equipment.
Go deeper
Image: Photograph by Mike Peel ( www.mikepeel.net ).. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source.