Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, this book features 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century indigenous textiles woven by the Aymara and Quechua peoples of the Andean Mountains. The elaborately patterned pieces are all drawn from the previously unpublished Jeffrey Appleby Collection and include everyday and ceremonial textiles of all types. 178 illus. 147 in color.

In the world of the ancient Andes, textiles were often the most valuable commodity people possessed—far beyond gold and silver—and they were a major medium for conveying critical cultural meaning. Textiles of the Andes features a wealth of rare and exquisite pieces, many of great iconographic and technical importance, ranging in date from the Paracas to the Inca and Colonial periods, from 200 BC to the late 18th century. Examples of contemporary Andean textiles complement the early pieces and illustrate the continuity of weaving traditions in the Andes. • Detailed photos show each textile in full • Glossary of technical analysis for designers • Authoritative introduction by an expert in the field provides a context for appreciating and enjoying the superb and varied designs

The Quechua people of southern Peru are both agriculturalists and herders who maintain large herds of alpacas and llamas. But they are also weavers, and it is through weaving that their cultural traditions are passed down over the generations. Owing to the region's isolation, the textile symbols, forms of clothing, and technical processes remain strongly linked to the people's environment and their ancestors. Heckman's photographs convey the warmth and vitality of the Quechua people and illustrate how the land is intricately woven into their lives and their beliefs. Quechua weavers in the mountainous regions near Cuzco, Peru, produce certain textile forms and designs not found elsewhere in the Andes. Their textiles are a legacy of their Andean ancestors. Andrea Heckman has devoted more than twenty years to documenting and analyzing the ways Andean beliefs persist over time in visual symbols embedded in textiles and portrayed in rituals. Her primary focus is the area around the sacred peak of Ausangate, in southern Peru, some eighty-five miles southeast of the former Inca capital of Cuzco. The core of this book is an ethnographic account of the textiles and their place in daily life that considers how the form and content of Quechua patterns and designs pass stories down and preserve traditions as well as how the ritual use of textiles sustain a sense of community and a connection to the past. Heckman concludes by assessing the influences of the global economy on indigenous Quechua, who maintain their own worldview within the larger fabric of twentieth-century cultural values and hence have survived everything from Latin American militarism to a tidal wave of post-modern change.

In this volume, anthropologists, art historians, fiber artists, and technologists come together to explore the meanings, uses, and fabrication of textiles in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia from Precolumbian times to the present. Originally published in 1991 by Garland Publishing, the book grew out of a 1987 symposium held in conjunction with the exhibit "Costume as Communication: Ethnographic Costumes and Textiles from Middle America and the Central Andes of South America" at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.

"This book explores the importance of textiles in Andean societies, past and present, as vital indicators of regional ideas about technique and technology, and the ways these interact with power relations, including gender and class relations. The focus is on Andean textiles from a weaver's point of view, as living things which express a complex three-dimensional worldview through their structures, techniques and iconography. These ontological conceptions are traced through the various tasks and processes in the productive chain of textile making, and the manifold ways in which the ideas about a finished textile product refer back continually to these shared experiences in Andean societies. Different thematic approaches examine how the material existence of textiles served, and still serves, as a record of technological knowledge, at the heart of human-centred efforts to integrate and coordinate diverse populations into socio-cultural and productive endeavours in common."--Page 4 of cover.

Textiles were the Incas' most prized possessions. Their first gifts to European strangers were made not of gold and silver, but of camelid fibre and cotton. They believed that the highest form of weaving was created expressly for the sun, which they considered the greatest of the celestial powers.

A view from the weaver's fingertips: the technical and creative come together in a pioneering study of Andean weaving