Ancient Cultural Contacts between Ecuador, West Mexico, and the American Southwest: Clothing Similarities

Abstract

Clothing styles, design motifs, and techniques of cloth production found in codex illustrations and on pottery and extant textile fragments suggest diffusion of culture traits from the northern coast of South America to West Mexico and on into the American Southwest. The non-mesoamerican garments depicted in a West Mexican sixteenth-century manuscript and on mortuary figurines buried more than 1,000 years earlier in an adjacent area find analogs only in styles that were present in Ecuador from 1500 B. C. up to the time of Spanish contact. Clothing and textile design motifs represented on figures found in the West Mexican shaft tombs of Ixtlán del Río, Nayarit, indicate that these parallels existed as early as 400 B. C. A variety of other data suggest that intermittent maritime contact persisted between Ecuador and West Mexico through the intervening period and into the sixteenth century.