Storytelling: Textiles 

As the use of the phrase “spinning a yarn” suggests, an association has long been made between weaving and storytelling. The word spinning was often found regularly in ancient Hindu texts including the Vedas, as Puntambekar and Varadachari (1926) described in their book Hand-Spinning and Hand-Weaving.

When the poet sings his invocation to Agni, he asks of the gods “to spin out the ancient thread”. The continuity of life itself and of the human race is compared to the continuity of a well-spun thread. ‘As fathers they have set their heritage on earth, their offspring, as a thread continuously spun out.’

It has been argued that all forms of art tell stories. Included among those forms of art are weavings. Weavers in the Andes, Silverman writes, “are modern scribes who use thread as opposed to pen and ink, to produce motifs in a true pictoric dictionary” (1993, 14). In Oaxaca, Mexico woven cloth is said to be a language used to tell stories.

The earliest evidence of weaving dates back some 27,000 years. Thaat earliest evidence  was found in impressions of weaving made on clay. Further, clay was used to create small “Venus figurines”, or small clay statuettes, that are wearing a large number of woven objects: skirts and belts, as well as hats, headbands and necklaces.

A prehistoric society in which some of the world's finest weavers lived was on the coast of Peru. Between 800 BCE and 100 BCE the Paracas people traded locally grown cotton for wool from  llamas and alpacas that were being raised by people in the Andes. 

They carefully spun the cotton and wood into fine thread and yarn. First, a cloth was woven out of plain cotton.  Brightly colored wool threads were used to decorate the fabric with embroidery depictions of costumed dancers, plants, double headed birds, pampas cats, llamas, fish, serpents, llamas carrying loads of vegetables, serpents, plants, mystical creatures including shamans who are part human and part eagle and who can fly through the air.  In one claw they hold severed human heads and the other claw held the knife that was used to cut off the head. 

The weaving woven in Paracas weavers has been found in tombs. Mummified bodies of the dead were wrapped in finely woven and skillfully and brightly embroidered mantles or shrouds. Even today, thousands of years later, the colors remain bright and the skill is obvious. The complexity of the weaving and the beauty of the embroidery communicated the social status, wealth, and social affiliation of the deceased. Two thousand years later those weavings can tell us stories about the Paracas people. They are telling us stories about their lives and concerns.