纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 024帕拉卡斯纺织品(3)（在线收听）

These early Peruvians seem to have put all their artistic energies into textiles. Embroidered cloth was for them roughly what bronze was for the Chinese at the same date: the most revered material in their culture, and the clearest sign of status and authority. These particular pieces of cloth have come down to us because they were buried in the dry desert conditions of the Paracas peninsula, just like the textiles that have survived from ancient Egypt from the same period, thousands of miles away. And in Peru, as in Egypt, the textiles were intended not just for wearing in daily life but also to wrap the dead. The Paracas textiles were used to clothe Peruvian mummies.

The Canadian weaver and textile specialist Mary Frame has been studying these Peruvian masterpieces for over 30 years, and she finds in these funeral cloths an extraordinary organisation at work:

"Some of the wrapping cloths were immense in these mummy bundles - one was 87 feet long. It would have been a social enactment, a happening, to lay out the yarns to make these cloths. You can have up to 500 figures on a single textile, and they are organised in very set patterns of colour repetition and symmetry patterns. The social levels were reflected in cloth to a tremendous degree. Everything was controlled about textiles - what kind of fibre, colours, materials could be used by what groups. And I think there has always been a tendency to do that - in a stratified society - to use something major, like textiles, to visibly reflect the levels in the society."