Liturgical textiles from the Spanish colonial reducción of Santa Cruz de Tuti, Colca Valley, Peru

Summary

A highly visible symbol within the church, liturgical cloth plays an important role in the communication of ideas about the wealth and authority of the Catholic Church. During the colonial period in the Andes, the influence of liturgical textiles extended to reinforcing ideas about the power of the Spanish Empire as well as the role of indigenous populations within it. Although cloth production during the period of Spanish colonization is a subject discussed to some extent by art historians looking to better understand the garments and tapestries found in museums and churches across the Andes today, very little research has been conducted on colonial textiles recovered from archaeological contexts. This paper presents a discussion of textiles recovered in situ from the sacristy of the colonial reducción of Santa Cruz de Tuti, located in the Colca Valley, Peru. In particular, I present a preliminary structural and stylistic analysis of the archaeological specimens, and compare them to the liturgical textiles of the sacristy in the descendent community of modern Tuti.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeological Microhistory at a Planned Colonial Town in Highland Peru

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17566