I photographed this object while I was in the museum, even though the legend said it wasn’t on exhibit because it’s too fragile. I think I got it right. It’s rare for an archeologist to get to work with textiles, because usually they disintegrate. In this case, a piece of cloth that was used to bind/wrap a mummy, in ancient Peru way pre-Inca, survived, so we can enjoy the bizarre pattern of the weave. The fabric was made from the wool of llamas and alpacas, two of those glorious South American mammals that for some reason still never appear in a child’s farmyard set of toys--although I’ve seen a number of them out biking around western Washington recently). The dyes used to color the fabric come from diverse local sources such as the roots of plants (the dominant red color) or local mollusks (the cooler colors). And it takes lots of people to weave a complicated pattern like this one, so clearly whoever was buried with this as his mummy cloth was a bigshot. The mummification used by the ancients on the Paracas peninsula of Peru, wedged between the sea and the Andes, involved folding the corpse up and binding it once rigor mortis set in. Sounds pretty horrifying, but then I guess mummies always are.
Even more horrifying, perhaps, are the monsters depicted on the textile. My picture doesn’t show this very well, but their arms end in talons and they’re carrying daggers and severed heads. MacGregor’s Great Expert #1 (can’t remember her name, a fabric historian) vaguely pointed out that these people, like the Incas and Mayans and Aztecs who followed them, must have had lots of human sacrifice in order to ensure fertility and appropriate weather, although she didn’t give much evidence for this assertion. I’ve noticed that whenever archeologists or anthropologists want to explain why this or that ancient group practiced human sacrifice, they ALWAYS assume it had to do with fertility myths, i.e. that wherever human beings noticed the seasons they started killing each other as a way of regulating them. I wonder if it’s more complicated than that. I was a little more thrilled, when listening to the podcast here, to recognize MacGregor’s Great Expert #2, Zandra Rhodes, who I just recently worked with and who gave me, as an opening night gift, a framed, signed copy of one of her Anubis-head costume designs for Seattle Opera’s recent Magic Flute production. What a classy lady! Here she spoke more generally, with her signature enthusiasm, about how blessed she thought we all were that this amazing textile had survived.
Zandra Rhodes' award-winning costume designs for our Flute (photo by Rozarii Lynch)
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