Overview
The Andes produced one of the world’s great textile traditions, and it began before pottery, before metal, and before the loom. Preceramic sites on the Peruvian coast preserve worked cloth in quantity because the desert simply does not let organic material rot, so this is one of the few places on earth where the earliest stages of clothing can be examined directly rather than inferred.
Key garments and style
The first textiles were made without a loom at all. Twining, looping and netting build fabric by manipulating yarn directly, and they produced the loincloths, bags, mats and headgear of the period; the heddle loom, and with it true weaving, arrives later. Native cotton was cultivated on the coast, and camelid fibre — llama and alpaca — supplied the highlands. At Huaca Prieta the twined cotton cloth carries deliberate designs, faint to the eye and recovered by modern imaging, which makes these among the oldest patterned textiles anywhere; fragments from Guitarrero Cave in the highlands are older still.
Two things are worth holding together here. Cotton was grown as much for fishing nets and lines as for clothing, and the productivity of those nets is one standard explanation for how such an arid coast supported early monumental building — cloth technology underwriting a civilisation before it dressed one. And on the far south coast the Chinchorro were wrapping and preparing their dead with reed, fibre and hide long before Egypt mummified anyone, so some of the best-preserved material is funerary.
Transition
Once the loom arrives, this accumulated skill turns into the embroidered mantles of Paracas and the tapestry of the Andean civilisations that follow — where cloth becomes the region’s principal store of wealth and its highest art form.