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Nasca: Woven Cosmos and Cross-looped Time

Abstract The Brooklyn Museum textile (BMT), sometimes called “The Paracas Textile,” is an exquisite ceremonial cloth produced on the South Coast of Peru and dated to Nasca 2 (c. 100–200AD). The cloth's complex three-dimensional border shows a procession of ninety fabulously costumed and brightly colored figures. Each tiny figure only stands about four inches tall, yet is so carefully worked that even the motifs on their clothing are visible. Some hold vegetables; others brandish weapons; others lead haltered llamas… together, their parade offers a tantalizingly vivid glimpse into an ancient, lively world. In 1991, I prepared a complete set of drawings of the border figures for the Brooklyn Museum. Building on those drawings, this study considers how the border may have depicted a ritual procession across the Nasca plain, and perhaps served as a solar calendar to help ritual specialists time parades along a sacred path. Moreover, the border frames a central cloth whose qualities render it an archetypal Andean fabric: a sheer, reversible, and seamless four-selvage web whose quartered designs are embedded into its two-dimensional fabric plane, and seem to fold out from the central cross of its grainlines. This evocative construct corresponds to long-lived Andean ideas about the shape of cosmic space and time.