Ix Jornadas Internacionales De Textiles Precolombinos Y Amerindianos 9th International Conference On Pre Columbian And Amerindian Textiles

29 papers from Conference in Milan 2022

The Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Germany, houses Europe's largest collection of PreColumbian textiles-around 9000 well-preserved examples. Lena Bjerregaard was conservator of these materials 2000-2014, and she worked with many international researchers to analyze and publicize the collection. This book includes seven of their essays on the museum's holdings - by Bea Hoffmann, Ann Peters, Susan Bergh, Lena Bjerregaard, Jane Feltham, Katalin Nagy, and Gary Urton. Its second part is a 177-page catalogue of 273 selected representative items, arranged by period and style. There are more than 380 photographs. Styles or cultures shown include Paracas, Nasca, Sican/Lambayeque, Ychsma, Chavin, Siguas, Tiwanaku, Wari, Chimu, Central Coast, Chancay, South Coast, Inca, and Colonial. Items pictured include tunics, clothing, tapestry, hats, belts, headbands, samplers, borders, and khipus. Materials include camelid fibers, feathers, hair, cotton, reed, straw, and other plant fibers.

Along the coast of Peru is one of the driest deserts in the world. Here, under the sand, the ancient Peruvians buried their dead wrapped in gorgeous textiles. As organic material keeps almost forever when stored without humidity, light and oxygen, many of the mummies excavated in the last hundred years are in excellent conditions. And so are the textiles wrapped around them. Their clear colors are still dazzling and the textile fibers in good condition. Textiles were highly valued objects in ancient Peru - used for expressing status and diverse messages in these non-literate but highly organized and very developed cultures. Much energy, innovation and aesthetic sensibility were invested in the textiles. The preColumbian peoples had access to exquisite materials: the local fibers were camelid fibers (alpaca and vicuña), cotton and plant fibers (agave, for instance). The camelid fibers have very little scales compared to sheep fibers, and are long, soft and lustrous. The Peruvian cotton grew in 5 different colors. The ancient Peruvians were also master dyers and have for thousands of years dyed their yarn with indigo blue, madder red, cochineal red, sea snail purple and yellow from many kinds of plants. And so they produced some of the finest, most beautiful and most interesting textiles in the world. Instead of writing, they kept the order in their world encoded in textile fibers. The Roemer- and Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim houses a collection of 405 preColumbian textiles. Most of them are fragments, but a few complete pieces are present. I have chosen 133 pieces for this publication, to represent the collection at its best.

Collected papers from the Conference on Pre-Columbian Textiles VIII, which was organized by Serge LeMaitre and held at the Museum of Art and History in Brussels on March 18th to 22nd, 2019. Includes chapters by Jessica Lévy Contreras, Ann H. Peters, Carolina Agüero & Arturo Martínez, Amy Oakland, Lourdes Chocano Mena, Arabel Fernández L. & Luis Valle A., Isabel Martínez Armijo, Anna-Maria Begerock & Mercedes González, Penelope Dransart, Beatriz Carbonell, Mónica Solórzano Gonzales, Gloria Martha Sánchez Valenzuela, Alejandra Quintanar Isaías & Ana Jaramillo Pérez, Victoria Solanilla Demestre, Katalin Nagy, Jean-François Genotte, Griet Kockelkoren & Emma Damen, Carolina Orsini & Anna Antonini, Beatriz Devia & Marianne Cardale de Schrimpff, Mariana Alfonsina Elías, Silvana Di Lorenzo & Silvia Manuale, Verónica Auza Aramayo, Ricardo Cavalcanti-Schiel, & María Elena del Solar. Sponsored by The Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH), Bruxelles.