Hacking the Ancient Binary Cosmic Codes of the Inca’s Woven Textiles
Mainstream history relates how human beings hunted their way out of Africa and eventually reached the landmass now called South America about 15,000 years ago. Trading across vast mountain ranges and coastal deserts instigated a requirement to communicate increasingly more complicated ideas over greater distances and for new ways to convey and record information. Long before formal written systems of communication were developed, ancient cultures in the Andes mountains kept track of dominant natural phenomena and weather cycles, important cultural, political and mythological events in a woven symbolic language; a rich artistic communication system, enshrined in textiles and fabrics.
Tupa Inca tunic, created between 1450 and 1540 AD. Wool and cotton. 90.2 x 77.15 cm. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. (Public Domain)
The Ancient Origins of Weaving
Knitting ancient hunting communities together, cordage production specialists braided, lashed, spliced, threaded, bound and tied together essential survival tools, but the first indications of ‘weaving’, according to an archaeological report on Donsmaps.com: “were found in indistinct textile impressions in clay and burned remnants of cloth at the Upper Palaeolithic Dolní Věstonice site dating to 27,000 years ago.” The oldest known woven textiles and cordage ever found in the Americas were detailed in scholar Kevin Stacey’s 2013 research paper titled Carbon dating identifies South America's oldest textiles as having been: “discovered in Guitarrero Cave, Peru, made from plant fibers dating to between 10,100 and 9,080 BC.”
