HOW DID THE TEXTILES COME TO BE IN GÖTEBORG?
Archaeological textiles were illegaly exported from Peru following their discovery at the beginning of the 20th century. Collecting them used to be a prestigious task, and therefore apart from Peru itself, there are Paracas textiles in art museums and private collections all over the world and in many western museums of ethnography. Today textiles from Paracas are among the most sought-after heritage objects in the illegal market.
Large quantities of Paracas textiles were illegally exported to museums and private collections all over the world between 1931 and 1933. About a hundred of them were illegally exported to Sweden and donated to the Ethnographic Department of Göteborg Museum by Sven Karell, the Swedish Consul in Peru, who then wished to remain anonymous. More is known today concerning the problems associated with looted artefacts and illicit trade in antiques.
HOW WERE THE TEXTILES FOUND?
During the opening years of the 20th century, embroidered textiles from an unknown Peruvian civilisation began cropping up in private collections. They had been found by tomb raiders and were unlike anything previously known from ancient Andean civilisations. They were described as fantastic because of their advanced technique and the colourful, exciting world which their embroideries apparently depicted.
These remarkable finds caused a sensation, and archaeologists now began looking for the place they came from. In 1925 the Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello prevailed on the tomb raider Juan Quintana to guide him and his colleagues to the place. The site he took them to was in the Paracas peninsula in Peru.
The excavations in the Paracas peninsula in the 1920s unearthed housing complexes and more than 100 burials of various sizes. For 2000 years the diseased had lain swathed in woven, embroidered textiles of cotton and llama wool.
The most sensational burial find was named Necrópolis de Wari Kayan, which can be roughly translated as “the burial place of the ancestral temple”. A funerary complex was found here containing 429 buried bundles. They belonged to a civilisation which was dubbed Paracas after the site and they rank among the most spectacular archaeological discoveries ever made in the Andes. This is where the Paracas textiles in the present exhibition are believed to come from.
Although more than 80 years have passed since scholars began charting the Paracas civilisation on the basis of finds from the Paracas peninsula, very little is still known about the way people lived and how their society was organised. Modern research has shown that the region throughout which the Paracas civilisation extended was bigger than the actual peninsula where the tombs have been found.
THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE PARACAS CIVILISATION
Paracas was the first complex society inhabiting the southern coast of Peru. The civilisation evolved over a period of some 900 years. This period is divided into an early phase, called Cavernas (c. 400-100 BC), followed by the Necrópolis phase (cf. 100 BC-300 AD), during which the Paracas civilisation developed into a more independent culture with ideological and stylistic manifestations of its own. The Paracas textiles in the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg are believed to have been made between 100 BC and 300 AD.
