Peruvian Mummies, Textiles, and the British Museum Director

Today in my Pre-Columbian Art History class we learned about textiles from Peru used to wrap corpses around 300 B.C. These lengths of fabric could be up to 80 feet in long and include up to 500 embroidered figures. The extreme dry environment on the Peruvian coast helped preserve not only the textiles for over 2,000 years but also the corpses. Creating these textiles took years, enormous

amounts of labor (dye colleting, gathering wool from Alpacas and other Camelids, and the actual stitching). These textiles are an indicator of complex organization of society and labor. Attached is a link to a wonderful podcast from the BBC narrated by the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor. A personal hero. In it, even a modern fashion designer muses over finding inspiration from these ancient works of art and clothing. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/wm8NbFLMQGGc5zX7d7mszg