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Chapter 4: Blood, Fertility, and Transformation: Interwoven Themes in the Paracas Necropolis Embroideries
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Blood, Fertility, and Transformation: InterwovenThemes in the Paracas Necropolis Embroideries Vancouver,Canada The Necropolis of Wari Kayan on the Paracas Peninsula is the source of an extraordinarily rich textile legacy . Four hundred twenty-nine bundles were excavated at this south-coast site during the late s by Julio C. Tello and his team. The funerary bundles were concentrated in two areas, or nuclei, on the flank of Cerro Colorado, where they had been placed within abandoned dwellings. The largest bundles, when unwrapped, revealed exquisitely embroidered fabrics (J. Tello ; Tello and Mejía ; Carrión Cachot , ). Despite nearly two thousand years of being buried in the sandy desert, many of the fabrics are still bright in color and in excellent condition. Questions persist as to who is buried at the Necropolis site and where the textiles were made. Water is scarce on the peninsula, the habitation site near the beach is small, and no signs of the spinning, weaving, and embroidering activities so evident in the Necropolis bundles have been unearthed there. In the adjacent valleys of the south coast, three cultural traditions were interacting between about .. and .. (Paul a: ), the time span represented at the Necropolis. Ceramics of the Paracas, Topar á, and Nasca traditions overlap in time and spatial distribution in the area from the Cañete Valley to the Nasca drainage (Silverman ). Several embroidery styles occur at the Necropolis, and they are mixed together in some of the bundles. While some embroidered figures resemble figures on Nasca ceramics, it is Topará ceramics that are found at the site. These and other puzzling facts have generated divergent hypotheses to explain the Necropolis burials: a local peninsula population who used the burial site continuously (Paul ); a population living in the adjacent valleys who buried their dead on the peninsula (Peters; Silverman); secondary depositions of bundles removed to the peninsula from Pisco Valley burial sites (Rowe ); a regional cult drawing textile tribute from south-coast populations in a number of valleys for rituals and burials on the peninsula (Frame). While final answers to the most basic questions await further Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru archaeology, the embroidered fabrics and the bundles in which they were placed provide a window into the myth and ritual surrounding the burial of the dead at the Necropolis site. Of the bundles excavated at the Necropolis, about were large or medium in size and contained the majority of the richly embroidered fabrics. The large bundles have some consistency in their layered construction and the range of offerings they contain, although each bundle is quite distinct. The embroidered textiles interleaved in the bundle layers have the form of garments, but it seems likely that they were new when placed in the bundles (Carrión Cachot). Some bundles have matching garments, but they may also have high numbers of a single garment type and an absence of other types. The sizes of garments are variable, ranging from miniature to gigantic, and there is little discernible pattern in the distribution of sizes, beyond the occurrence of the largest mantles and shirts in the outermost layer of the largest bundles. Large bundles, such as Bundle (Paulb), can include the smallest garments, aside from the packets of truly miniature garments that accompany bundles. The apparent newness of the garments, the mixtures of embroidery styles in some bundles, and the odd distribution of garment types and sizes draw into question the assumption that the textile offerings pertain solely to the person in the bundle. The character of bundles may relate more strongly to what the people who constructed the bundles ritually were expressing through the medium of clothing. The construction of the bundles has a degree of correspondence with the themes represented in the embroideries, and both will be discussed in more detail. Numerous studies have been devoted to the description of the intriguing imagery on the more than one thousand fabrics with figurative embroidery. Many have contributed to the identification of animal, plant, costume, and supernatural attributes of figures, or to the description of some figure types. Labels such as mythological beings, demons, impersonators, trophy-head warriors, supernaturals, and cult objects have been used by researchers to describe the human- and animal-like figures and to suggest meaning. However , relatively little work has been done on the interrelationships between figures1 and the underlying themes, which will be the focus of this chapter. This chapter will look at three layers of references that recur in textiles embroidered in...