UC San Diego

Textiles serve as an important medium for the communicating socio-cultural information in societies throughout the world, including those of Andean South America. Archaeological studies of pre-contact textiles from the Andean region usually involve pieces from museum or private collections, which are often looted and rarely have associated provenience data. This study, on burial textiles from two cemeteries at the site of Río Muerto (M43) in the Moquegua Valley of southern Peru, is among only a handful of studies on archaeological Andean textiles that involves scientifically excavated garments and items with carefully recorded context data. The burial textile assemblages of 43 individuals from the pre-Inca Tiwanaku culture (approx. A.D. 300-1000) are analyzed here in order to better understand social roles and group identity in the coastal valleys of southern Peru during the Middle Horizon (A.D. 500-1000) period. The Tiwanaku people of M43 conveyed multiple messages about the identity of community members in the treatment of their dead. These messages, as they are encoded in textile style, suggest a group with some status differences based on age and gender, and a possibility of inherited status. The clothing buried with individuals from M43 also suggests that they were immigrants (or descendants of immigrants) from the highlands who wished to maintain their identity despite their relocation to a coastal valley.