Las prendas bordadas de la necrópolis de Wari Kayan

Hilos del Pasado: El Aporte Frances al Legado Textile Paracas, 2007

This the original English manuscript of the article published in Spanish in 2007 and 2011. The process of building the mummy bundle is described with an emphasis on the items that "animate" the interred ancestor. The types and distribution of garments reveals ideas about the growth and transformation of the ancestor into an animal counterpart. Finally, issues of chronology and style are discussed and updated.

Zea Books, 2017

The importance of headdress is indicated by its careful arrangement on the head of the recently deceased, display on the apex of a mortuary bundle, and prominent depiction in contemporary artifacts. In woven, embroidered or painted imagery, headdress elements include featherwork, the body of a bird or mammal, draped cloth or intertwined bands, often depicted as serpents. Due to their position above the human body, the headdresses are the most consistently preserved textile artifacts in tombs of the Paracas Necropolis mortuary tradition. Some elements appear only with men, others are found with both men and women and certain headcloths are unique to women. Diverse headdresses are present in each bundle, and the forms, materials and styles change among funerary contexts placed in the Necropolis of Wari Kayan and other sectors of the Paracas site between about 200 BCE and 200 CE. Therefore, headdresses provide insight into changing social identities, relationships to the landscape, and political alliances with neighboring societies linked to the late Paracas and early Nasca traditions, demonstrating a dynamic process of interaction and transformation on the south coastal region of the Central Andes.

The Ancient Nasca World: New Insights from Science and Archaeology, 2016

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.

Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal, 2011

Arqueología y Sociedad 19: 241-264, 2008

Many facets of the imagery and patterning remain to be investigated, despite the impressive output by Peruvian scholars in the first decade after discovery. This study focuses on the clothes and adornments worn by a particular figure that is depicted on the embroideries, and on the association of this figure with a group of figures that are clothed differently. To appreciate the distinctiveness of the clothing depicted on the figure at the center of this study, it is necessary to first review the types of garments that were placed in the funerary bundles.

I N C A: Textiles and Ornaments of the Andes, 2018

Short popular synthesis about the relationship between textiles and funerary contexts in the Central Andes-Exhibition Catalog Chapter.

2008

2012

The early 25th Dynasty coffin of Padiamun (Liverpool 53.72) was acquired in Egypt by James Burton. Padiamun and his brother Nehemsumontu (whose coffins are in Boulogne-sur-Mer and Grenoble) and their father were chiefs of the navigation of the great river barque of Amun in Thebes, and his mother was descended from a scribe of the estate of a Divine Adoratress of Amun (also attested on a stela in New York). The design of the coffin is characterized by a high degree of creativity in the combination of iconographic elements and texts from the mortuary traditions of the Litany of the Sun and the Book of the Dead. The theme of solar-Osirian unity that characterizes coffins, stelae, and funerary papyri dating to the Third Intermediate Period from the Theban region is evident in the interior decoration. Figures from the Litany of the Sun, flanking an anthropomorphic djed pillar at the base, associate the deceased with the sun and Osiris. The mummiform deities from the Litany of the Sun reveal a demonic character as well, since most of them hold knives, recalling the function of the sA.w, the “protectors” of the body of Osiris, represented on papyri and coffins already in the Middle Kingdom. Elaborate solar images and symbols and the figure of Nut at the head end emphasize the solar rebirth of the deceased. Demonic guardians are also the main motif of the external decoration of the coffin box, which consists of an abridged version of vignettes and texts from the Book of the Dead Spell 145. Book of the Dead motifs related to the final judgment occur on the lid exterior along with the text of Spell 125. This paper will present the preliminary results of the ongoing study of this coffin, including discussion of the family relationships of Padiamun and the acquisition history of his coffin, and the peculiarities of the iconography and texts, contextualizing them within the funerary religion of Third Intermediate Period Thebes.