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Under the supervision of Museum conservator Madeleine Fang, a team of graduate students, volunteers, and a conservation assistant have completed a project to re-house approximately 900 extremely rare and fragile textiles. The textiles, primarily fragments, were placed into individually fabricated, acid-free cardboard folders or boxes. These containers support and protect the piece in storage and alleviate unnecessary handling during study and viewing. Each piece was digitally photographed for a database that combines images with catalogue information. Funding was provided by the William Randolph Hearst Endowment for the Conservation of the Collections which has also supported recent conservation and re-housing of the Peruvian ceramic collection and the current North American Basketry/ethnographic textile move and re-housing.
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Textiles were a main ceremonial good and an integral part of the political and social structure of ancient Andean societies. The major fibers spun and woven in the ancient Andes were cotton in the lowlands and deserts and the wool of camelids, such as llama and alpaca, in the highlands. Archaeological evidence shows the cultivation of cotton as early as 2000 B.C. Possession of fine cloth came to be defined as a royal privilege and meant that grants of it were highly valued by the recipient. The extraordinary value placed on textile arts in this class-differentiated society is revealed through reciprocal duties and privileges associated with the production of cloth. The peasantry's main obligations to crown consisted of the delivery of food produced on state lands and of cloth made of the state's wool. Fulfilling these obligations guaranteed the right to plant and harvest one's own crops on peasant lands, and the right to weave the family's clothing using wool or cotton from the community stocks.
Objects excavated by Max Uhle, at the turn of the nineteenth century, form the core of the Museum's Ancient Peruvian collection. Numbering 9,500 catalogue entries and spanning a period of about 3,000 years (ca. 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.), the collection represents the entire geographic area, though is richest in artifacts from the coast of Peru. Uhle worked for the University of California from 1899 to 1905 under the patronage of Phoebe Hearst. Known as the "Father of Peruvian archaeology," Max Uhle (1856-1944) formulated descriptive definitions of regional styles and devised a chronological framework of stylistic change applicable to the entire Incan realm. With modification, his scheme remains today the basis for Andean archaeology.
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