纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 024帕拉卡斯纺织品(1)

024 ：EPISODE 24 - Paracas Textile 帕拉卡斯纺织品

Abstract摘要 :

Textile fragment from the Paracas peninsula on the southern coast of Peru (made around 300 BC)

秘鲁南部海岸巴拉加斯半岛的纺织品碎片（约公元前300年制造）

MP3听力原文：

Fashion as we all know is glamorous and extravagant, frivolous and ephemeral. But it's also a great way to grasp how a society thinks about itself. Looking at clothes is a key part of any serious looking at history. But as we all know to our cost, clothes don't last - they wear out, they fall apart and what survives gets eaten by the moths. Compared with stone, pottery or metal, clothes are pretty well non-starters in a history of the world told through 'things'. So regrettably, but perhaps not surprisingly, it's only now, well over a million years into our story, that we're coming to clothes and to all that they can tell us about economics and power structures, climate and customs, the living and the dead.

"Textiles just have a very unusual place." (Mary Frame)

"It's a constant amazement when we discover these things, and find that they're not new, and that they were invented years ago." (Zandra Rhodes)

The theme of our week so far has been one of empires collapsing, new regimes, and massive bloodshed. In the South America of 500 BC there were no empires yet to be overthrown but, as we shall see, there certainly was blood. We're learning new things all the time about the Americas at this date but, compared to what we know about Asia, much is still relatively mysterious, belonging to a world of behaviour and belief that we still struggle to interpret from fragmentary evidence.