I was already a weaver when I started studying Andean art at university and I became fascinated by the unusual non-woven techniques of ancient Peru. The weirder, the better, from my point of view. I always felt I learned a lot by recreating the textiles I studied. Makers have a certain way of seeing cloth. I like to think that recreating a technique opens a pathway into the thinking of the ancient makers. I began to think through my hands.
Researching Four-cornered Hats
The direct impetus to study four-cornered hats stemmed from an invitation to write a catalog to accompany an exhibit of thirty-two hats that Julie Jones was curating at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1990. The hats to be exhibited were a promised gift from Arthur Bullowa and were available for me to study at his nearby apartment before they were accessioned by the Met. Most of the hats had pile (figure 1) and I got to study them all, including those with interesting variations in technique and construction.
Although I didn’t use the technical analysis of the pile hats in the exhibit catalog, I began including the basic knotting technique of the ground cloth in workshops, which is a series of lark’s head knots. The pile technique is one of several methods used to pattern the sides of four-cornered hats. The threads that make up the velvet-like pile on the sides of the hat are worked into the knotting as the cloth is made. What fascinates me is the elegance of a handheld technique that combines the foundation structure, as well as the patterning possibilities of the supplemental pile elements. How the loops were cut is an open question. I hypothesize that the pile loops were wound around a pair of sticks, which would keep the loops the same length and provide a channel for running a blade along to cut the pile at the end of a row. Changing colors in the pile elements is a matter for experimentation by the maker, as some colors only appear in one or two knots. When small areas of a color intrude, the major color may have been carried along inside the lark’s head knot, ready to carry on as pile in the following area.
The hats have nine parts: four sides, four corner points and a flat top. They are sometimes joined structurally, with knots, rather than sewn. The hat top has no pile and has a textural pattern that arises from the two faces of the knot as well as increasing the number of knots in each round. The four corner points can be triangular without pile or cylindrical with pile. All four sides could conceivably be knotted onto one starting edge, but no such unfinished example has surfaced. Although rare, unfinished specimens can provide support for at least parts of a hypothetical reconstruction of the technique, and I thank Nobuko Kajitani for her generosity in sending me the slides reproduced here.
I have encountered only a few artifacts with pile, other than the four-cornered hats. Cords are sometimes sheathed in a tube of knotted pile. This is really the same technique as the cylindrical points on the corners of some hats (Figure 2), but much longer. Another group of objects seems to be cap-like wigs with unspun locks of fiber knotted into the ground cloth. These can look like “fright” wigs from Halloween costumes, especially the pink ones. A related object—I’m not sure if it is a bag or a mask or both—has mainly red or pink locks of unspun fiber knotted into the ground fabric. One side is all pink, but the other side has what seems to be eyes and a mouth. These features make me think it is a mask or a bag with an upside-down face. The proportions suggest it is too small for any human head. This object is available for everyone to see on the website of the World Culture Museum, Göteborg, Sweden, catalogue number 1932.02.0108. They call it a mössa or knitted cap (it should be knotted cap).
Reintroducing the Four-cornered Hat Technique to Peruvian Weavers
I had the opportunity to teach the knotting technique and hat construction to Quechua weavers at Tinkuy 2013 in Cusco, where I relied heavily on demonstrations and diagrams. My imperfect Spanish wasn’t good enough to express subtleties, and some students only spoke Quechua, which I didn’t speak at all. It was a challenging teaching situation, teaching without using many spoken words, but I was encouraged by what I had observed in villages in the past. Most young weavers seem to learn by silently watching a sister or mother as they worked, before going off to work it out in their hands and mind on their own. It may be that workshop classes don’t fit that well with Andean ways of learning, which tend to stretch over extended periods. I collected from the weaving communities many learning samples for the museum, half-done and full of irregularities, which seem to reflect a lengthy learning process.
Tinkuy was a great social encounter. The workshop participants were from any of the ten communities plus English speakers who came from abroad. We had lots of laughs, particularly with one of the Chahuaytiri men, who was nicknamed the “doctor” because he acted like he knew everything. He seemed to like his title, which encouraged him to ham it up. Some of the quiet ones in the class made solid progress, as they concentrated on what was a new technique to them. Although they may have known the lark’s head knot as a joining structure for ropes or cords, they had never strung them together in rows to create fabric. One young man from Pitumarca had finished a non-pile hat when I went back a year later. [Editor’s note: The weavers of CTTC today are creating beautiful Wari-style hats for sale to textile enthusiasts and collectors.]
I am thrilled to see the reintroduction of ancient techniques, such as the four-corner-hat knotting, that is happening in the CTTC communities. What could be better than Peruvian weavers recovering and refining ancient Peruvian techniques? They are already immersed in their long fabric tradition and should have the best insights into the logic of techniques used by their ancestors. They know immediately when they make a mistake in direction because they feel the excess twist in their yarns. Their hands, their eyes, and their minds are attuned to the subtleties within the cloth, as they are contributing to the history of this textile tradition in Peru. The Center for Traditional Textiles has done amazing things for the weavers so far, which leaves me very hopeful about the future.
