Dressing the Leader, Dressing the Ancestor: The longue durée in the South Central Andes

The preservation and adornment of the dead in the South Central Andes can be traced over some twelve thousand years. The nature of social and political ancestry and its relationship to power change over time with the development of large-scale complex societies. These changes are reflected in the types of garments used to dress the outside of mortuary bundles and their references to socio-political roles and associations. Archaeology has barely begun to develop the analytic approaches to take advantage of textile analysis in order to reconstruct – or theorize – multifaceted identities, networks of social and political relationships, and production and exchange practices embedded in particular environments. While the Andean region provides some of the best environments for preserving textiles, and for natural mummification of the human body, the best conditions are relatively stable in temperature and humidity: the foggy deserts, dry high altitude caves, and glaciers. The potential for preservation of human bodies and fine textiles in these environments contributed to a continuing social and political role of the dead in the lives of the living and the conservation of a textile library in these mortuary contexts. When the Spanish invaded the Andes in 1530, they quickly had to learn that the preserved and finely dressed bodies of previous Inkas and other Andean leaders were important agents in current politics, visiting each other, resolving disputes, authorizing marriages and being carefully attended to by their descendents) describe well-dressed mummy bundles of regional lords that participated in public ritual and could be cited as proof of heritage and to validate social and political leadership. Carefully preserving and attending to ancestral bundles was also essential to the wellbeing of the community as a whole, as the ancestors interceded with the forces of nature to ensure good harvests and ward off pestilence. 2 Figure 1. The south-central Andean region, with sites mentioned here. The oldest examples of body preservation and adornment come from the 'land of eternal spring' at the great bend of the continent, where the Atacama desert spans the Tropic of Capricorn and, just to the north, a string of volcanoes separates the high Lake Titicaca basin from the Pacific coastal valleys. This is the sphere of cultural development that led to Tiwanaku, and the home of some of the greatest work on textiles by our colleagues Cáses and of course Paulina Brugnoli and Soledad Hoces de la Guardia. This paper …