The Body, the Regalia, the Weapons, and the Mortuary Bundle: Forms, Materials, and Uses of Cordage at the Paracas Site

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In study of Andean archaeological textiles, a focus on decorative “high status” objects too often produces a distorted vision of ancient textile traditions, obscuring the textile forms most commonly found in an excavated assemblage. Ethnoarchaeological study by Cases (2020) has begun to address this problem by looking at production contexts in both present and past Andean communities, where cordage plays a major role. Cordage is everywhere at Paracas, made from many different fibers and structurally diverse. The heavy cotton wrapping cloths that layer and shape each mortuary bundle are stitched and bound with plied cords. Aside from ubiquitous cotton and camelid hair—spun, plied, and re-plied into the structures studied by Splitstoser (2014)—special-purpose cords are made from reeds, animal sinews, bast fiber, and human hair employed at different scales for both pragmatic and decorative purposes. They compose and join a wide range of artifact components. In the interstices between wood, bone and stone, cloth and feathers, cane and fiber, hair and metal, or shell and skin, diverse forms of cordage play hidden roles to hold it all together. Perhaps for this reason, as Frame (1986, 1991) has noted, cord structures are represented on “high status” decorative objects.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35892.0