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Cahuachi and the Paracas Peninsula: Identifying Nasca Textiles at the Necropolis of Wari Kayan

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The Ancient Nasca World

Abstract

In 1996, the team of the Centro Italiano Studi e Ricerche Archeologiche Precolombiane (CISRAP), headed by Giuseppe Orefici, discovered a small cache of elaborate Nasca textiles at Cahuachi that provides new bases for identifying Nasca-style textiles in other regions, including those excavated on the Paracas Peninsula by Julio C. Tello. In the late 1920s, Tello’s team excavated 429 mummy bundles, some of them very large and elaborate, within the walls of earlier buildings at the site that he called the Necropolis of Wari Kayan. Although some authors persist in calling the Wari Kayan textiles “Paracas” textiles, similarities with the Cahuachi textiles indicate that a significant proportion of the embroidered textiles from the Necropolis of Wari Kayan are Nasca style. To support this contention, I will first present a detailed description of the techniques and imagery of the three Nasca textiles excavated at Cahuachi in 1996, and will then select a small number of distinctive features. The distinctive features will be used to correlate textiles from the Necropolis of Wari Kayan with similar clusters of features, which identify them as Nasca style. The expanded sample of Nasca-style textiles, including those from the Necropolis of Wari Kayan, contains strong indications that the Nasca people embedded extensive bodies of systematic numerical data into their textiles, which will be briefly described here. Finally, issues of the style and chronology at the Necropolis of Wari Kayan will be reviewed and updated.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The technical and iconographic information on the Cahuachi textiles from the olla is included in a manuscript that was submitted in 2000 for publication in a conference proceedings that has not so far been published. A brief description of the textiles, with photographs and drawings of the iconography, has been published (Frame 2009b: 200–209).

  2. 2.

    The grave contents of a high-ranking girl that was excavated at Cahuachi (Orefici 2012: 547–565) included a pair of red and black garments, which I examined in 2011. One was a black garment with a red sewn-on border, and the more fragmentary one was a red garment with black sewn-on borders. Both garments had woven tabs on the exterior edge, beyond the sewn-on borders.

  3. 3.

    It is possible that different types of garments had continuous borders on four sides, which would make it difficult to identify the garment type if all traces of ties were obliterated. There is, for instance, a garment with four continuous borders that has a horizontal neck-slit cut into the center (319-23, RT1264). Also, an unusual example of an embroidered poncho with a vertical neck-slit has continuous borders (Frame 1999: Plate 12).

  4. 4.

    Specimens 38-13, RT2710 (see Frame 2001: Fig. 4.6a) and 38-47, RT3222, are additional mantles with central borders while specimens 38-39b, RT2555 and 38-39c, RT2936 are additional examples of the loincloth with continuous borders on four sides.

  5. 5.

    Single-faced stem stitch, which is the more common stitch and has only one good face, moves forward over four threads and back under two threads of the ground cloth. Double-faced stem stitch, which has two good faces and is an interlocked stitch, moves forward over six threads and back under four threads of the ground cloth (Bird 1954: 99).

  6. 6.

    Loincloths with continuous borders in bundle 319 include 319-14, RT2892; 319-22, RT608; 319-26, RT624; 319-69, RT2764; 319-82, RT2551; 319-91, RT4142; 319-92, RT2934; 319-93, RT 2455, 319-94, RT2604; 319-108, RT2890; 319-110, RT2969 and 319-111, RT2515.

  7. 7.

    382-10, RT5904 and 382-48, RT1017.

  8. 8.

    378-23, RT1345, 378-27, RT2809 and 378-31, RT2633.

  9. 9.

    Red headbands with images of three or four twisted or braided strands in dark threads (Frame 1991: Figs. 4.2, 4.10, and 4.13) may correspond to simpler color patterns on embroidered mantle borders and fields of the “silhouette” or “linear” style, which are non-Nasca styles in the Wari Kayan bundles.

  10. 10.

    Many of these headbands have been published in Frame (1991: Figs. 4.1, 4.5–4.7, 4.11, 4.14, 4.16, 4.17, 4.28, 4.34) or Thays and Aponte (2012a: 495, center).

  11. 11.

    In 1984, I proposed a joint project on the color and symmetry patterns of the Necropolis embroideries to Anne Paul, on which we worked together until 1993. Paul published the color project in 1997.

  12. 12.

    Paul (1982) considered the “broad line” style might be a family style because it was concentrated in four bundles. The “silhouette” style, which includes the “broad line” sub-style, has a wider distribution among the bundles at the Necropolis of Wari Kayan.

  13. 13.

    Paul (1990: Tables 5.2 and 5.3) added bundles and made several small changes to Dwyer’s seriation. She moved bundle 27 to EIP 1B from EIP 2, and moved bundle 258 to EIP 2 from EIP 1B.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Giuseppe Orefici and Elvina Pieri for the opportunity to study the textiles excavated at Cahuachi and for their assistance in the publication of the present article. I value the interchanges with colleagues Delia Aponte, Isabel Iriarte, María Ysabel Medina, Mirtha de la Cruz, and Carmen Thays, and thank them for the help they have given me in person and by email. The support of the Selz Foundation, which provided travel funds to study the textiles from Cahuachi and the Necropolis of Wari Kayan in Peru on various occasions, is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Institute of Andean Studies, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Mary Frame

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  1. Mary Frame
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Correspondence to Mary Frame .

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  1. National Research Council (CNR), Institute of Archaeological and Monumental Heritage (IBAM), Potenza, Italy

    Rosa Lasaponara

  2. National Research Council (CNR), Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis (IMAA), Potenza, Italy

    Nicola Masini

  3. Centro Italiano Studi e Ricerche Archeologiche Precolombiane (CISRAP), Brescia, Italy

    Giuseppe Orefici

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Frame, M. (2016). Cahuachi and the Paracas Peninsula: Identifying Nasca Textiles at the Necropolis of Wari Kayan. In: Lasaponara, R., Masini, N., Orefici, G. (eds) The Ancient Nasca World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47052-8_18

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