Costume and History in Highland Ecuador

Preface

Preface This book is a surprise. I originally assembled the information presented here as background for a study of the contemporary indigenous costume of highland Ecuador, done in collaboration with Lynn A. Meisch and Laura M. Miller and based primarily on their fieldwork during the 1980s. It did not take me long to realize, however, that a new synthesis of the material was required in order to make even the simplest statements. For example, it seemed necessary to summarize the history of Ecuador’s indigenous peoples to provide the context for a discussion of their costume. Yet the state of the available literature was such that a useful summary could not be done by any one of us whose work had been mainly ethnographic. Therefore, I requested manuscripts from archaeologists and historians who were more familiar with the resources available in these areas. In addition, the amount of evidence available on historical costume proved to be more plentiful than I had anticipated. The result was that I eventually realized that instead of an introduction to our work on contemporary costume, I had a whole separate book. Because of pressure to produce an exhibition and the importance of publishing field data, the material on contemporary costume was prepared and appeared first, in Costume and Identity in Highland Ecuador, edited by Ann Pollard Rowe (The Textile Museum, Washington, DC, and University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1998), and an exhibition was held at The Textile Museum in 1999. Some reference is made in the 1998 book to the more detailed background information here, but it was certainly not my intention that it would take so long to publish. In the difficult task of dividing the costume information, the basic criterion I used was to include data collected in our 1980s fieldwork in the earlier book, and to hold the material gleaned from published sources and museum collections for the present volume. Since some of our fieldwork included in- xii Costume and History in Highland Ecuador formation on recently obsolete costume styles and styles worn only by older people, some data of this kind does appear in the earlier book. To avoid excessive repetition and keep the present volume to a publishable length, this material is referred to but not presented in any detail here. The amount of historical information is, not surprisingly, uneven for different parts of highland Ecuador. For this reason the coverage here is also uneven, and some areas covered in the earlier book have been omitted entirely. The earlier book is still available, and we encourage interested readers to seek it out. In addition to costumes, we collected data on textile techniques, published partly in the 2003–2004 issue of The Textile Museum Journal in 2005, and partly in our book Weaving and Dyeing in Highland Ecuador, edited by Ann Pollard Rowe (University of Texas Press, 2007). Historical background on these subjects was included in those publications and is only referred to but not repeated here, notably that on natural dyes, the use of leaf fibers, and the making of “Panama” hats. Additionally, Lynn Meisch has published separately her research on beaded jewelry in Ecuador (Meisch 1998). The text for this volume was originally written in 1993–1994. The delay in publication has been due to work on the earlier two books; the length of time it took to figure out how to publish the technical data, which was too much for one volume; and the press of my regular curatorial duties, which no longer included an exhibition on Ecuador. I certainly never intended to spend so much of my life on this project. Due to John Howland Rowe’s death in 2004, his chapter on the Incas in Quito has been published as he submitted it in 1993, except for the deletion of a small amount of redundant material. I deeply regret having asked him to go to the trouble of writing this text and then having been unable to publish it in his lifetime, although in his always understanding and loving way, he never nagged me about it. The other authors were, however, asked if they wished to update their texts, and most have done so. For my part, I have continued to collect information as it came to my attention, but it has not been possible to pursue archives in Ecuador. Karen Bruhns’ text on pre-Inca costume, although written for this volume, has in the interim been published in Spanish (Bruhns 2002). Asking multiple authors to...