Andean weaving instruments for textile planning: The waraña coloured thread-wrapped rods and their pendant cords

Abstract

Recent studies on the Andean knotted threads, called khipu, consider their use not only as records of quantity, but also as more general recording and documenting devices, with integral planning aspects. This possibility has been explored in relation to khipus as finished artifacts and as composite objects under construction. However, until now, studies of Andean textiles have tended to restrict their analysis to the semiotically constituted construction of already completed artifacts, with less attention to their relation to this wider administrative domain. Here we consider textiles as part of wider productive networks, in their totalities and their constituent parts. We reconsider some archaeological and historical weaving instruments, called waraña in Aymara, from this point of view, using ethnographic analogies to suggest ways in which these instruments might have been used in the past in these wider planning and administrative systems overseeing textile production.