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Paracas Ritual Attire: Symbols of Authority in Ancient Peru. Anne Paul. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1990. xi + 198 pp., color plates, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $48.50 (cloth).

In the 11 years since completing her doctorate in art history, Anne Paul has established herself as a leading scholar in the description and interpretation of Paracas design, with a number of papers on various aspects of the embroidered textiles from the Necropolis of Paracas, dealing with both their symbolism and the methods used by the embroiderers. When I first read Paracas Ritual Attire, I found it somewhat thin in comparison to what I believed were her earlier papers, and I was disappointed that it did not contain some of her conclusions from those papers. I then discovered that, in fact, this is an early work; it is an only slightly revised version of her doctoral dissertation, even to the use of her original, rather sketchy pen-and-ink drawings. She is a good photographer, however, and her illustrations are of textiles that have hitherto not been seen. In the text, she has added only recent ethnographic fieldwork (Chapter 2), in support of her theories. The embroidered mantles and other garments from the Paracas Necropolis constitute one of the textile wonders of the world, and they have few, if any, known predecessors or worthy successors in the Peruvian record. Dated by Paul and others at between 450 and 175 B.C., they are relatively early in the sequence of loomwoven textiles in Peru, preceded only by earlier phases of Paracas and Chavin. The technical excellence of most of these garments is unsurpassed. In some pieces, almost the entire garment is covered solidly with stem-stitch embroidery, leaving only alternating strips of bare ground cloth for contrast. With their large size, the range of colors used, and their excellent state of preservation, they are startlingly beautiful. Julio C. Tello and Toribio Mejia Xesspe excavated 429 mummy bundles at the Necropolis in 1928 and 1929. Seventy-five of these were considered large to medium in size, and it was from these that Tello and his associates chose 40 or more bundles to unwrap in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia y Arqueologia, Lima. Some of these bundles contained more than 100 artifacts. Paul is one of very few people to have systematically studied the contents of the unwrapped mummy bundles in the Museo Nacional since the bundles were first opened. She has attempted to locate all of the large bundles and has found all but 13. For this volume, she has chosen to focus on the contents of two bundles with additional data from 46 others. In the future she plans to examine other bundles in greater detail. All of the bundles that were opened contained the mummies of men of advanced age and high status. Paul calls these men "rulers," though based on her own calculations of the distribution of "high status burials through time" (p. 32, Figure 3.1) their average length of reign could not have been much over five years. Moreover, some of the bundles appear to be contemporary. Beginning on p. 31, Paul points out that some scholars have suggested that the bodies of important persons were brought from other areas to be buried at the Necropolis. Given the amount of stylistic variation in textiles from outlying Paracas sites, this seems unlikely. A ruler, or chief, from another village would surely have wished to be buried with items representative of his seat of power. It seems more likely that these are the remains of priests and important elders as well as village chiefs or rulers. Virtually all of the dating for Paracas is based on a seriation of Paracas pottery from lea by Dorothy Menzel, John Rowe, and Lawrence Dawson, plus a few uncalibrated radiocarbon dates from lea and other south-coast sites; and as Paul (pp. 74-75, footnote 5) rightly points out, "the weakness in the seriation approach is that it assumes that most stylistic and iconographic differences may be explained by chronology." Until we have calibrated dates based on a sampling from the Necropolis bundles themselves, we can never be sure of the absolute accuracy of the dating or the chronological sequence. The garments in the bundles include mantles, ponchos, tunics, kilt-skirts, headdresses, and what have been called loincloths by everyone writing on Paracas costume. The garments were placed around, but not on, the body in more or less the way in which they would have been worn. The loincloth, a rectangular cloth with borders on three sides and tapes sewn to the narrow bordered edge, is placed in the midsection of the bundles at the same location as the shoulder ponchos. I recently found an illustration of an early Nazca male figurine (Spielbauer, Archaeology 25[l]:20-25) wearing what appears to be an identical garment, except that the tapes are attached to the undecorated narrow edge, with one panel hanging over the chest and an identical one over the back. It would be worth exploring the nature of this garment further. An area of some disagreement is whether the sumptuous garments in the bundles were or were not made specifically for burial. The facts that the garments show little or no wear, that "sets" of garments are broken up and sizes vary within bundles, and, most important, that a number of garments were not completed when they were placed in the bundles, have led many schol-