Symmetries of Corn and Cloth in the Ancient Americas: Pattern Generation, Botany, and the Maize Matrix

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Precolumbian Dotted-Diamond-Grid Pattern: References and Techniques" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Several precolumbian royal garments with simple, repeating geometric designs have explicit associations to maize, and hint at a deep significance to the cloth pattern–corn plant connection. In the Andes, Inca Coyas (noblewomen) wore special woven belts during the annual corn-planting ceremony. Sophie Desrosiers deciphered Murúa’s colonial-era code for the belt pattern in the 1970s, replicated the design, and located a few museum specimens. In 2002, Lynn Meisch encountered weavers in highland Peru still producing almost identical “Sara” belts, named after the “Mama Sara,” an oversized corncob. In Mesoamerica, likewise, the Aztec *tlatoani (king) wore a blue-green mantle with a dotted-diamond grid design (*xiuhtlapilli tilmatli); it belonged to a maize-inspired panoply of regalia worn and wielded by Mesoamerican sovereigns for millennia, including sprout-shaped crowns, leaf-like quetzal plumes, dewdrop-like jade beads, and cob-like greenstone celts. Aztec maize goddesses and their impersonators wore similarly decorated fabrics, but in white or reddish tones. Maize was fundamental to precolumbian societies, so regents sought to associate themselves with its promise through dress. This investigation addresses the multiple visual, dynamic, and metaphorical correspondences that link these textile patterns to maize, especially to the mutated and twinned cobs symbolic of extraordinary potency.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• The Precolumbian Dotted-Diamond-Grid Pattern: References and Techniques

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 31965