Mantle with condors
Peru, south coast, Paracas culture
c. 300–100 B.C.
Camelid fiber
51 1/2 x 110 in. (130.81 x 279.4 cm)
The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., in memory of John O'Boyle, 1972.4.McD

In the funerary bundles recovered from Paracas burials, layer upon layer of hand-woven cloth wrapped each body, which was placed in a basket, its limbs flexed in a seated position. Coarse cotton cloths separated embroidered garments and other objects into as many as six layers. One bundle included among its contents ten embroidered and eight unembroidered mantles, four headbands, thirteen headcloths, five ponchos, two tunics, and a loincloth. The same motif often appears on several different garment types, suggesting that they were worn together as a costume, probably by an aristocratic man.

The largest and most impressive of the Paracas garments is the mantle, which would have been worn as a shoulder cloth, the unfringed areas at each side falling across the wrists. Two separately woven rectangles of dark blue were seamed along the inner edges to form the ground cloth of this mantle. The red squares that frame the birds and the wide, bird-patterned border were embroidered on the ground cloth. Here, as in other ancient Andean textiles, the most vibrant colors represent yarns spun from the hair of the llama, alpaca, and vicuña, animals of the Camelidae family native to the Andean highlands, for these yarns readily accepted dyes. The embroidered birds—identifiable as male condors by the ruff of feathers (shown as a white collar) and the outspread wings—are repeated with a change in vertical orientation in the squares and a change in both orientation and scale in the border, characteristic Andean textile devices for achieving variety with a single motif.