If Threads Could Talk: Listening to Andean Textiles at the Louisiana University Museum of Art

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the mid-1990s, the LSU Museum of Art received a collection of nearly 60 Andean objects as a donation from a private collector. More than half of the items donated are textiles and/or tools used in making textiles, all thought to have come from Peru. Beyond this geographic pointer, little information came with the collection, so the catalog entries for these items are overwhelmingly sparse. My research, as part of a MA program in Anthropology at LSU, began as an effort to better classify these nearly forgotten items and to fill out the catalog. In this paper, however, I aim to move beyond stylistic and cultural historical classifications by adopting an object biography approach and considering textiles as agents, I explore their multiple lives as they passed through various hands over time. As I try to make the “threads talk,” I dwell on their physical manifestations, visualities, and material conditions at various key moments in their past and current lives. More broadly, I use the textile collection as a springboard to investigate the historical intricacies of acts of collecting and the current challenges in studying museum collections.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38879.0