Ninety Figures at the Edge: The Textile Known as “The Paracas Textile”
Ninety Figures at the Edge: The Textile Known as “The Paracas Textile”
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Ninety small figures stand along the edge of a single textile. From a distance, the border reads as a bright band. Up close, the figures combine human, animal, plant and supernatural features, as if each one were carrying a small world on its body. Brooklyn Museum object 38.121 has long been known as “The Paracas Textile,” a name that reflects where it was found. The museum’s current catalog, however, looks to the border technique when discussing who made it: three-dimensional cross-knit looping is characteristic of Nasca 2 textiles, so the mantle is now attributed to Nasca artists. That distinction opens a more interesting question than simply asking which ancient culture “invented knitting.” How were the central cloth and the sculptural edge made differently, and what can the object tell us without pretending that every figure has been decoded? [1]
One object, more than one technique
The Brooklyn Museum dates the mantle to 100–300 CE and records its findspot as Cabeza Larga, on Peru’s south coast in the Paracas area. The museum acquired it in 1938 and has used the familiar title “The Paracas Textile.” Findspot, title and cultural attribution are three different kinds of information. The current catalog identifies the border figures as Nasca work because of their cross-knit-looped construction. It leaves open the possibility that the pale central cloth is earlier and may have come from the Ica Valley, where related imagery has been found. That is a hypothesis in the catalog, not a settled provenance for the center. [1]
Looking at the textile as two connected zones helps explain the reclassification. The central field is woven: it has a warp and weft structure, with a repeating design of face-like figures often described by the museum as the Oculate Being. The border is built differently. Its small figures are formed through three-dimensional cross-knit looping, and looped flowers connect the border to the center. Calling the whole object “an ancient knitted cloth” would collapse weaving and looping into one process. The object is more technically interesting because its makers combined distinct textile structures in one ceremonial-scale garment. [1]
Museum terminology needs care, too. The Brooklyn Museum uses “needle-knit” in its public interpretation and more specifically describes the border as “three-dimensional cross-knit looping.” The Textile Museum of Canada catalogs a Nasca fragment as cross-knit looping in camelid wool; the Cleveland Museum of Art uses the same technical term for a reversible border fragment. These descriptions do not prove that the objects were made with modern knitting needles or that their structure is identical to present-day two-needle knitting. “Looping” names a family of techniques in which a working strand is passed through existing loops. Here, the crossed paths and sculptural forms are the point. We can explain what museums record without turning a broad visitor-facing label into a claim about the origin of modern hand knitting. [1][2][7]
The textile’s survival is also part of its history. The Brooklyn Museum attributes its preservation to the dry climate of Peru’s south coast and notes that the fragile fibers require low light and protection from dust and moisture. The colors seen in a modern photograph should not be treated as a perfect record of how the mantle looked when new. Nor is the fact that a two-thousand-year-old textile survives separate from the choices made to conserve and display it. The object reaches us through both ancient making and modern care. [1]
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Makers and the limits of the record
The names of the people who made the mantle have not come down to us. “Nasca artists” is the museum’s current cultural attribution based on technique; it is not evidence that one named person made the entire garment alone. The catalog suggests that the central cloth may be older than the border, but it does not preserve a work diary, a maker’s signature or a record of how labor was divided. We should not fill that gap by inventing a solitary master artisan. The object itself gives us a much better path: compare its structures, materials and connections, and state clearly where interpretation begins. [1]
The museum describes ninety individual figures around the edge. Its 1991 guide counted about thirty as distinctive forms and grouped the rest by similarities in costume, color, posture and position. Lois Martin’s 2006 paper counted ninety-two figures. In a later article, Martin explored the textile as a possible 365-day calendar; that is a scholarly interpretation, not a deciphered consensus. The sources consulted do not explain the difference between the museum’s current count of ninety and Martin’s count of ninety-two. This feature follows the museum’s current catalog count when describing its record. The museum says no overall sequence has yet been deciphered. A procession-like border can invite us to look for a story, but visual repetition alone does not give us a definitive script, calendar or ritual explanation. [1][3][9]
The figures are not all presented from one viewpoint. In the museum’s description, faces are shown frontally while feet turn in profile; body parts are treated in standardized ways, and the design is organized around an imagined cross through the textile. The reverse of the border mirrors the front except for three figures that have both a front and a back. These observations are more secure than any single interpretation of what the figures “mean.” They let us describe the visual system while leaving room for future research into how it related to Nasca life, ritual and textile knowledge. [1]
Today’s museum record is itself part of the object’s biography. The 1938 accession, the 1991 guide, later scholarly analysis and the current attribution to Nasca artists document successive acts of collecting and interpretation. Photograph credits matter for the same reason. A license for reusing a digital image is not the same thing as cultural ownership or authority to interpret the object. We identify the museum and image record, and we treat the textile as a work made by a community whose individual makers remain unknown—not as an anonymous pattern bank for contemporary design. [1][4]
Reading the mantle—and its comparisons
Start with the full view. A broad, pale center and a densely worked edge create an immediate contrast. The Brooklyn Museum lists the central support at about 170.8 by 84.5 centimetres; the catalog also gives a smaller measurement for the surviving textile, so those dimensions should not be confused with the size of its storage housing. The center repeats rows of face-like figures. The border carries a much more crowded sequence of three-dimensional beings. The mantle’s full rectangular form does not, by itself, tell us exactly how it was sewn, worn or used in burial. The catalog calls it a mantle or cloak and interprets it as an important ceremonial textile, but a photograph cannot establish all details of its use. [1]
Images 2 and 3 invite a slower look at the figures. Some stand with plants or animals; others carry objects or combine human and nonhuman features. The museum’s guide notes that some figures hold or display severed heads and small effigy-like forms, and that certain motifs have been interpreted in relation to fertility and cycles of life and death. Those interpretations belong to the museum’s account and to scholarship about the imagery; they are not a universal key that decodes every figure. The responsible way to read the border is to distinguish visible description from cultural interpretation, and both from what remains unknown. [1]
Image 4 shows a different Nasca textile in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection, not a fragment of the Brooklyn mantle. The museum dates its Border Fragment with Birds and Flowers, accession 1948.480, broadly from 100 BCE to 700 CE and identifies camelid fiber worked in reversible cross-knit looping. The image shown here is a separate Nasca cloth with a procession of figures in the Cleveland collection. Another small border fragment in that collection is only about 14 by 5.8 centimetres. Comparing separate objects helps us see that a similar looping technique could produce different figures and edges; it does not make them pieces of one original garment. [6][7]
Image 5 is a later coca-leaf bag in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection. LACMA dates it to 600–800 CE and identifies it as Nasca, Wari-related, from Peru’s south coast. Its medium combines camelid fiber and cotton, dovetailed tapestry, loop-stitch embroidery and braided fringe. It is not part of the 100–300 CE Brooklyn mantle and is not a reconstruction of it. Its value as a comparison is different: one object can bring weaving, looped embroidery and braided finishing together. For knitters, that is a useful reminder that a surface that looks like a row of loops may be embroidery laid over a woven ground rather than the ground structure itself. [8]
None of these museum records supplies the original needle size or stitch count as a modern knitting pattern. We do not invent them. To study the mantle, begin instead with the object number, material description and visible structure. Ask where the woven center ends, how the looped flowers connect it to the border, and how the figures are shaped. Those questions are more faithful to the surviving evidence than pretending that a catalog photograph is a complete set of instructions. [1][2]
Timeline
- 100 BCE–700 CE. The Cleveland Museum of Art gives this broad range for its separate Nasca cross-knit-looped border fragment, 1948.480. [7]
- 100–300 CE. The Brooklyn Museum dates mantle 38.121 to this period. [1]
- 600–800 CE. LACMA dates its Nasca, Wari-related coca-leaf bag to this period. [8]
- 1938. The Brooklyn Museum acquires the mantle and begins using the title “The Paracas Textile.” [1]
- 1991. A Brooklyn Museum guide describes the border figures and their repetitions; the current catalog retains some of that observation while noting that no overall sequence has been deciphered. [1]
- Today. The museum attributes the border to Nasca artists on the basis of its cross-knit-looping technique, while leaving open questions about the central cloth’s earlier history. [1]
Reading what remains uncertain
The object is called “The Paracas Textile” because of its findspot, yet its three-dimensional edge is attributed to Nasca makers on technical grounds. Within the same mantle, a woven center, looped flowers and a sculptural border meet. Its name, findspot and maker attribution do not collapse neatly into a single label. That complexity is not an obstacle to enjoying the textile; it is the beginning of a more precise kind of looking.
Next time you see a photograph captioned “ancient knitting,” look for the museum number, the material, the structure of the loops and the difference between where an object was found and who made it. Then check who photographed it and what reuse terms apply. The figures along this edge remain partly mysterious, but the technique, the textile’s layered construction and the history of its interpretation give us a rich story without claiming to know more than the evidence supports.
Sources and image credits
Numbered citations point to museum records and research materials. Images 1–3 are Brooklyn Museum collection photographs distributed via Wikimedia Commons with no known copyright restrictions noted in the file records. Image 4 is credited to Sailko under CC BY 3.0. Image 5 is linked both to its Commons public-domain file record and to LACMA’s object record, which credits Museum Associates/LACMA for the photograph.
- Mantle (“The Paracas Textile”), 38.121 · Brooklyn Museum collection record and catalog interpretation
- Nasca artifact 1: cross-knit-looped camelid-wool border fragment · Textile Museum of Canada
- Lois Martin, research on the Paracas textile · Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings
- Brooklyn Museum photograph, full view · Wikimedia Commons file record
- Brooklyn Museum photograph, detail view · Wikimedia Commons file record
- Sailko, separate Nasca figure-procession textile · Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
- Border Fragment with Birds and Flowers, 1948.480 · Cleveland Museum of Art
- Bag for Coca Leaves, M.74.151.16 · Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- Lois Martin, “Keeping Nasca Time: The Brooklyn Museum Textile as a 365-Day Calendar,” Textile Museum Journal, vol. 49 (2022) · The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum