Tunic with Birds

Place CreatedPeru, South America

CultureChimu

PeriodLate Intermediate

Dateca. 1000-1450 CE

MediumCotton, camelid fibers

Credit LineEx coll. C. Clay and Virginia Aldridge

Dimensions15 1/4 x 44 1/2 in. (38.7 x 113 cm)

Object number2002.001.004

Exhibition HistoryMCCM Permanent Collection Gallery, Textile Rotation, March 2006 - September 2006
Threads of Time: Tradition and Change in Indigenous American Textiles, Michael C. Carlos Museum, August 19 - December 17, 2017
Published ReferencesMCCM Newsletter, September - November 2002.
Elizabeth DeMarrais, "Animacy, Abstraction, and Affect in the Andean Past: Toward a Relational Approach to Art," Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27 (2017): 659, Figure 3.
Threads of Time: Tradition and Change in Indigenous American Textiles, 2017, http://threads-of-time.carlos.emory.edu/items/show/32.

ProvenanceEx coll. Curtice M. Clay Aldridge (1910-2003), Columbus, Georgia.

Status

Not on view

Collections

Art of the Americas

Technical NotesThe loose plainweave of this huipil is woven from brown cotton. While the color may have altered slightly over time, the brown is probably natural and not dyed. A few millimeters of a single thread were removed for analysis by Direct Analysis in Real Time mass spectrometry (DART-MS) by the Armitage Archaeological Chemistry Research Group at Eastern Michigan University. The absence of quercetin, which is found in many brown dyes, as well as the lack of gallic acid, which is often present in tannin dyes like browns, suggest that this cotton fiber is undyed. The DART-MS results from the ancient sample were also comparable to results from reference sample taken from a modern huipil known to be woven from undyed natural brown cotton.