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Preface
Paul Hughes, 1996
In the archeology of textiles, the fortunate preservation of Andean Pre-Columbian textiles is no less than
miraculous. The ancient Andean weavers have engendered within a continuous living tradition, spanning 3 000
years to our days, a wider corpus of textile iconography than any other known culture. Considered from the
viewpoint of composition, these textiles attained, without a doubt, the highest levels of artistic
expression and symbolic signification, creating thereby the most impressive textile legacy in the world.
In the main, the ancient Andes designates an area stretching from
Columbia to the Tierra del Fuego in Chile. Previous publications have
presumed that most of the archeological findings came from Peru whilst
ignoring the Atacama desert and the Azapa Valley in Northern Chile. The
archeologist Junius Bird has published examples of such works which
relate strongly to the exhibits and bear testimony to the historical
importance attached to the Arica area by every known seminal cultures of
the Peruvian far south coast and northern Chilean regions. We owe the
preservation of those textile treasures to the extraordinarily dry
climatic conditions of the coastal regions and to the hermetically
sealed caves discovered in the highlands.
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