The funerary mantle features complex mythological creatures with mingled animal and human characteristics, who carry trophy heads on the ends of their snakelike appendages. These figures are embroidered in camelid wool onto a red woollen ground and on two woollen borders. The textile was found in the necropolis of Wari Kayan, and was numbered Object no. 15 in Mummy Bundle no. 38.¹

The deity is the same god that is shown in the mantle with flying figures (cat. 15), also with reversed heads and feline headdresses. Here the deities have serpentine extensions with severed heads. The beings carry tumis (ritual knives) in one hand and a plant stalk in the other. Both toes and fingers are represented as jaguar or eagle claws. ‘The whole schema seems to be related to a fertility cult.’² Unusually, the gods shown in the borders are larger than those set in a checkerboard pattern in the main field, and all face the same direction, without the flamboyant reversals of other cloths. But the maker or makers of this mantle display the same irreproachable attention to detail and rigorous perfectionism of technique seen in the highest achievements of Andean textiles.

The colour scheme of red ground and dark-blue borders also appears in other Paracas textiles. In general, dyes were obtained from plants and animals:

red came from a plant related to madder, relbunium, or from cochineal made from the insect, coccus cacti. Blue was obtained from indigo. Yellow could have been made from a number of plants. Purple was sometimes obtained from a mollusc, as was the famous Tyrian purple. Little is known about the mordants involved in dyeing, but analysis has shown that both alum and iron were used for this purpose.³

The survival of rich red and other mineral, plant and animal dyes pays testament to the preservative qualities of the desert environment of the Paracas Peninsula burial sites.

Christine Dixon

1. Paracas: Trésors inédits du Pérou ancien, Paris: Musée du quai Branly and Flammarion 2008, pp. 22–23.

2. Paracas 2008, p. 22.

3. Mary Elizabeth King, Ancient Peruvian textiles from the collection of the Textile Museum,  Washington D.C., New York: Museum of Primitive Art 1965, p. 1, quoted in James W. Reid, Textile masterpieces of ancient Peru, New York: Dover Publications 1986, p. 10.

The funerary mantle features complex mythological creatures with mingled animal and human characteristics, who carry trophy heads on the ends of their snakelike appendages. These figures are embroidered in camelid wool onto a red woollen ground and on two woollen borders. The textile was found in the necropolis of Wari Kayan, and was numbered Object no. 15 in Mummy Bundle no. 38.¹

The deity is the same god that is shown in the mantle with flying figures (cat. 15), also with reversed heads and feline headdresses. Here the deities have serpentine extensions with severed heads. The beings carry tumis (ritual knives) in one hand and a plant stalk in the other. Both toes and fingers are represented as jaguar or eagle claws. ‘The whole schema seems to be related to a fertility cult.’² Unusually, the gods shown in the borders are larger than those set in a checkerboard pattern in the main field, and all face the same direction, without the flamboyant reversals of other cloths. But the maker or makers of this mantle display the same irreproachable attention to detail and rigorous perfectionism of technique seen in the highest achievements of Andean textiles.

The colour scheme of red ground and dark-blue borders also appears in other Paracas textiles. In general, dyes were obtained from plants and animals:

red came from a plant related to madder, relbunium, or from cochineal made from the insect, coccus cacti. Blue was obtained from indigo. Yellow could have been made from a number of plants. Purple was sometimes obtained from a mollusc, as was the famous Tyrian purple. Little is known about the mordants involved in dyeing, but analysis has shown that both alum and iron were used for this purpose.³

The survival of rich red and other mineral, plant and animal dyes pays testament to the preservative qualities of the desert environment of the Paracas Peninsula burial sites.

Christine Dixon

1. Paracas: Trésors inédits du Pérou ancien, Paris: Musée du quai Branly and Flammarion 2008, pp. 22–23.

2. Paracas 2008, p. 22.

3. Mary Elizabeth King, Ancient Peruvian textiles from the collection of the Textile Museum,  Washington D.C., New York: Museum of Primitive Art 1965, p. 1, quoted in James W. Reid, Textile masterpieces of ancient Peru, New York: Dover Publications 1986, p. 10.