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Pre-Columbian culture of South America. It centered on the Chancay Valley of the central Peruvian coast, ranging north and south to the Fortaleza and Lurín valleys, and is known for its distinctive pottery and textile styles. Chancay culture flourished between c. 1100 and 1470 ce, under Chimu rulership in the 15th century. Vessels and textiles have been found at such sites as Cerro Trinidad, Lauri, and Pisquillo, mostly in graves covered with stout timbers and a layer of earth.

Chancay vessels were made by coiling; modeled features sometimes occur, but elaborate jars were molded. The fabric, fired to a light orange, is thin and porous. Some vessels are covered with a plain white slip, but most are also painted with brownish-black designs. Forms include bowls, goblets, tumblers, cylindrical jars, and ovoid jars with rounded bases and narrow, bulging necks that sometimes end in a flaring rim. Vessel heights range from 60 mm for bowls to 750 mm for jars. Animals (especially birds and reptiles) and humans are frequently modeled on the upper shoulder or around a handle. More elaborate jars are zoomorphic or consist of two flasks connected by a bridge. Some show scenes, such as a dignitary being carried on a litter. Vertical black bands often divide design areas, within which are patterns of stripes, wavy lines, crosshatching, diamonds, triangles and dots, checkers, volutes, and stylized birds or fishes, sometimes in asymmetrical halves. Characteristic of the style are large, necked jars with faces (known as ...

Paracas refers to a peninsula and nature reserve, a sand-bearing wind, an archaeological site, three or more mortuary traditions, a ceramic sequence covering about 1000 years, and several styles of textiles and other artifacts that appear to have been created and used by culturally diverse communities (see also Pre-Columbian South America: Central Andean Area).

The Paracas peninsula juts into the Pacific Ocean on the desert coast of south-central Peru. Fresh-water springs emerge near the Bay of Paracas to the north and saline springs lie to the south. The cold waters of the Humboldt Current reach the peninsula, creating an extraordinarily rich marine environment. The “paracas” sandstorms periodically sweep across the peninsula and over the hills and plains to the south. This coastal region is a “foggy desert” with minimal precipitation, ideal for long-term preservation of a broad spectrum of ancient artifacts and other organic materials. During about ten thousand years of archaeologically documented Pre-Columbian history, cultural and political relationships connect the Paracas region with the Chincha and Pisco river valleys to the north and the Ica river and Nasca watershed to the south, as well as the Bay of Independence, oases on the desert plains, and the Andean cordillera to the east....

Textiles played a fundamental role in the social, aesthetic, and economic life of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Unfortunately, in the absence of the combination of burial practices and dry climate that preserved textiles in Egypt and coastal Peru, only fragments have survived, mainly in dry caves or in watery, oxygen-deprived environments, such as the “Sacred Cenote” at Chichen Itza. The earliest textile fragments (ex-Mus. Reg., Oaxaca) were found at the cave site of Guilá Naquitz in Oaxaca; they include examples dating to c. 8000 BCE of materials produced by techniques that did not require looms—knotted netting, cordage, coiled basketry. Similar pieces from Peru and the Great Basin, Nevada, have comparable dates. King (1973) suggested that certain non-loom techniques may have been brought across the Bering Strait into the Americas by early migrants. However, the earliest piece of Mesoamerican loom-woven cloth, which contains both cotton and yucca threads, dates to c. 1500 BCE, well after the appearance of cotton textiles in Peru (...

[khipuQuecha: “knot”]

Knotted string constructions made of cotton or camelid (llama or alpaca) fibers that were the principal devices used for record keeping in the Inka Empire of Pre-Columbian South America. The typical structure of a quipu is built on a multistrand spun and plied cord, called a primary cord, that usually has a radius of around a half-centimeter and an average length of some 85 cm. Thinner spun and plied cords, called pendant strings/cords, are knotted onto the primary cord. When the primary cord is suspended between the hands, the pendant cords hang pendant. Quipus have been found with as few as 2 and as many as 1500 pendant strings. Secondary, or subsidiary, cords may be tied onto pendant strings, while some carry third-, fourth-, and up to sixth-order subsidiaries. Thus, the structure of quipus may be likened to rhizomes, with linear and horizontal stems from which roots shoot downwards.

The pendant strings of quipus are usually knotted in complex patterns, most commonly with clusters of knots in tiers (about a palm’s width apart) down the length of the strings. In the majority of quipus, the tiered knot clusters signified numerical values in the base-10 (decimal) place value system used by Inka cord keepers—called ...