纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 024帕拉卡斯纺织品(4)

There was no writing that we know of at this time in Peru, so these textiles must have been a vital part of the visual language. The colours must have been electrifying against the everyday palette of yellow and beige hues that dominated the landscape of the sandy Paracas peninsula. They were certainly very difficult colours to achieve. The bright red tones were extracted from the roots of plants, while the deep purples came from molluscs gathered on the shore. The background cloth would have been cotton, spun and dyed before being woven on a loom. Figures were outlined first, and then the details - like clothes and facial features - were filled-in in different colours with exquisite precision, presumably by young people, as you need perfect eyesight for stitching like this.

Production would have required coordinating large numbers of differently skilled labourers - the people who reared the animals for the wool, who grew the cotton, who gathered the dyes and then the many who actually worked on the textiles themselves. A society that could organise all this, and devote so much energy and resource to materials for burial, must have been both prosperous and very highly structured.

Making the mummy bundles, in other words preparing the Paracas elite for burial, involved an elaborate ritual. The naked corpse was first bound with cords to fix it in a seated position. Wrapped pieces of cotton or occasionally gold were put in the mouth, and grander corpses had a golden mask strapped to the lower half of their face. After this the body was wrapped in a large embroidered textile - our fragments must come from one of these - and the encased body was then seated upright in a big shallow basket containing offerings of shell necklaces, bird feathers from the Amazonian jungle, animal skins and food, including maize and peanuts. Then body, offerings and basket, all together, were wrapped in layers of plain cotton cloth to form one giant conical mummy bundle, sometimes up to five feet (1.5m) wide.