Textiles amérindiens. Recherches récentes : du présent au passé et inversement

Abstract

The following articles have been presented at the meeting on Amerindian Textiles organized in 2013 at the musée du quai Branly, on November 28th-30th. The intention was to create the conditions for a dialogue between scholars doing research in various regions of the Americas on past and present textiles conceived with means and thought patterns related to pre-Columbian roots. This international colloquium gathered participants from Europe and America belonging to the various scientific and professional spheres involved in research on Amerindian textiles. It was the sixth of a series initiated in Barcelona in 1999 by Victoria Solanilla D. (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) and more generally focused on pre-Columbian textiles. Textiles are an important source to understand the societies that have created and/or used them, and to reconstruct their history. Amerindian textiles are especially interesting as specific climatic conditions, or other favorable conditions, have resulted in the conservation of corpus of archaeological textiles fostering the study of such objects in the “longue durée”. In some cases, one can talk about very “longue durée” as tools, knowledge and artifacts have been transmitted from generation to generation and their developments can be followed during several centuries, and even several millennia until today. Some textiles are considered as national heritage – as those from Coroma in Bolivia -, and others are inscribed on the Intangible Cultural World Heritage List – as weaving in the Taquile Island in Peru. This long history of Amerindian textile regards a continent where many regions from South to North have known and still know the same type of weaving loom and where cotton played a key role while integrating as soon as possible animal materials as camelid fibers and feathers with stronger and more diversified hues. Textiles are an important source to look at Amerindian societies in their diversity and in the multifold inter-regional relations that they can help to show thanks to their capacity for artistic and identity expressions. Our concern was to make clearer the richness of local characters as well as eventual connections revealing common cultural matrix or possible exchanges between societies considered as more or less far away in time and/or space.The quai Branly museum has generously supported the organization of the colloquium, as did the French embassy in Lima, the Institute of the Americas and the Centre de Recherches Historiques of the EHESS in Paris. Thanks to them, it has been possible to invite several American colleagues from Bolivia, Peru and the United States, and to enrich the range of topics to take into account. The lively debate following each session demonstrated that textiles constitute a strong area of research in the Americas. Our thanks go to each – institutions and participants. Additional thanks go to the Centre de Recherches Historiques for its help in the publication of the conference proceedings, and to the Campus Condorcet for its support in the organization of workshops on dying practice and fibers analysis that occurred before the colloquium.