Paracas Embroidered Textiles

The Paracas culture existed on the southern coast of what is now Peru, in the Pisco Province, between approximately 800 and 100 BCE. Most of what we know about them comes from burials, and most of what survives from those burials is textile. The preservation is a function of the desert. The Paracas Peninsula is one of the driest places on the coast, and organic materials that would rot elsewhere have lasted here for two millennia.

The textiles come from two types of burial site, both on a hill called Cerro Colorado. The earlier burials, called Paracas Cavernas, are shaft tombs cut into the hilltop, each containing multiple individuals. These tombs were reused over time, and there is evidence that the heads of some of the dead were removed, perhaps for rituals, and later returned. The textiles from these burials include complex weaves, plaiting, and knotting, as well as embroidery. The ceramics are polychrome, incised, and sometimes decorated with resist techniques.

The later burials, from a necropolis at Wari Kayan, are different. They consist of hundreds of conical bundles, each containing a single seated body wrapped in many layers of cloth. The bodies face north, across the bay. Each was bound with cord to hold the seated position, then wrapped in plain cloth, then in embroidered mantles, then in more plain cloth, in alternating layers. The bundles were placed closely together inside and around abandoned buildings on the slope. The ceramics from Wari Kayan are plainer than those from the Cavernas: fine wares, some with slips, some with burnished decoration. But the textiles are extraordinary.

The embroidered mantles are worked in camelid fibre on cotton ground cloth. Camelids—llamas, alpacas, vicuñas, guanacos—produce wool that takes dye brilliantly and comes in natural colours from white through fawn to brown and black. The embroidery is done in stem stitch, packed so tightly that the ground fabric is covered entirely. The figures are small, usually a few centimetres tall, and they appear in rows or scattered across the surface. They include humans, often with elaborate headdresses or holding severed heads or weapons. They include animals: birds, felines, fish, serpents, sometimes in combination. Many figures are impossible to identify with certainty because they combine attributes from multiple creatures.

The colour range is wide. Some mantles use more than twenty distinct hues. The same figure type will appear multiple times on a single cloth, but the colours change each time in a systematic rotation. This suggests that the embroiderers were working to a plan, with a supply of dyed thread organised in advance. It also suggests that the variation itself was meaningful, that sameness was not the goal.

The necropolis burials continued until around 250 CE, well after the main period of Paracas culture. Some of the later bundles contain textiles that resemble those of the Nazca culture, which followed Paracas in the same region. The transition is not sharp. Styles overlap.

Peruvian archaeologist Julio Tello began formal investigations of the Paracas sites in the 1920s. The textiles he found are now considered some of the finest produced by any pre-Columbian Andean society. They are the primary works of art by which Paracas culture is known. That is partly because they survived, and partly because they were made with extraordinary skill, but it is also because, in Andean societies, textiles held a status that other materials did not.