The royal Inca tunic in the Dumbarton Oaks collection in Washington is unique: it is the sole surviving textile made for an Inca emperor. Since it came to light in the late 1940s, it has attracted attention and admiration for the quality of the weaving and its striking design. This design is based on tucapus, the small rectangles with complex and colourful motifs that cover almost the entire shirt. Much research has focused, indeed, on these tucapus, including on whether they represent an early stage in the development of writing in the Andes. And yet key questions about the tunic have remained poorly understood, including where it was made, by and for whom and for what purpose. Even its dating is uncertain, and it has often been supposed to be early colonial rather than pre-conquest.
Through splendid research, which is consistently surprising and sometimes astonishing, Andrew Hamilton provides persuasive answers to these questions and more. He demonstrates that the shirt was woven not by one artist but two – one more experienced than the other. He identifies these artists as women who worked in an acllahuasi, one a mamacona and the other a more junior aclla. The latter made mistakes, which (with the pattern of fading) helps Hamilton identify which side of the tunic was the front – the one woven by the mamacona. The fact that mistakes were left in the shirt also points to the agency of the weavers and their control over the finished product. They did not devise the tucapus, but it was they who chose which ones to weave and in what positions. And then, after years of work, they abandoned their task when they were within literally hours of completing it.
Hamilton regards this as his most important finding, because it points to a date and circumstances of manufacture. Only a shirt never worn by an emperor could have survived the regular ritual immolation of such items, and only some drastic turn of events could have led to the work being halted so abruptly. The tunic, Hamilton argues, must have been woven before the Spaniards’ arrival but abandoned amid the sudden trauma of the conquest itself; he thus dates it precisely to 1528–33. This also means that it was woven either for Atahualpa or for Huáscar Inca. And, although the shirt has no provenance, he further shows that it is not an archaeological item, recovered from a tomb. It was an heirloom, treasured and worn for decades after the conquest until it became damaged and must have been carefully put away.
What is most striking about this is that, although Hamilton commands a vast literature of Andean art and history, his principal findings all derive from scrutiny of the tunic itself. He has studied it most intently and in every aspect, of manufacture, design or signs of ‘life history’ (indeed, he conceives of his book as a ‘biography’ of the shirt). This leads him to go much further than simply learning how to weave himself, the better to understand the choices and challenges facing its makers. He is like a method actor; the Daniel Day Lewis of art history. We find him growing indigo or rearing cochineal beetles for their dye. Investigating a Spanish report that Atahualpa wore a tunic of bat fur, he learns how to skin bats and makes his own bat fur thread. He guides us through complex discussions of weaving with dozens of his own illustrations, which show how the two women built up the textile’s wefts thread by thread, and the technical challenges inherent to the tucapus. He is always willing to go the extra mile to present the full story of the tunic. Having discovered that it has been subject to serious fading, particularly in one of its blues, he digitally recreates it ‘as new’; and the effect is stunning.
Moreover, all of this is central to the research itself. For example, Hamilton demonstrates conclusively that the arrangement of the tucapus responded exclusively to aesthetic and technical considerations, so that they cannot have encoded meaning like glyphs. His work thus kills stone-dead the long-standing debate about tucapus and writing; a finding which merited separate publication, but which here is dispatched quite briefly and with some irritation.
Readers might ask: What is all this to me? Why get excited about a single tunic, even one woven for an emperor? But this book sheds light far beyond the garment itself. In effect, it reads as an innovative study of the Inca Empire, written from the perspective of the tunic. It gives a powerful sense of the vast resources Tawantinsuyu could command in the making of such an object, and of the systems built up to facilitate its production. Acllahuasis are a prime case in point: treated here as manufactories, their high walls and restricted entrances were designed as much to protect the valuable materials housed there as the virginity of the women who lived within. Those women were freed from material want so as to be able to devote their lives to state service, but at the cost of freedom of movement, husbands or children. Two women who worked in one such acclahuasi, probably that of Cuzco itself, emerge here – quite movingly – in their discussions, debates and collaboration, as month by month the shirt came into being under their skilled hands.
It seems incumbent upon the reviewer to point to potential weaknesses in the book discussed, so here goes. In work as ambitious as this, inevitably some of the conclusions are more tentative than others, and I thought this was the case with the chapter devoted to the life of the tunic since the conquest (though it still presents many valuable insights). Hamilton’s insistence on the tunic as the pinnacle of art from the Andes – he calls it ‘the Mona Lisa of Andean art’ – sits uneasily with his own discussion of earlier textiles which were more accomplished technically and (arguably) even more impressive aesthetically. Elsewhere, some of the technical detail on weaving was lost on me, Hamilton’s best efforts notwithstanding.
No matter: I have not enjoyed an academic monograph so much in years. It stands not simply as a groundbreaking study of a unique and important object, set comprehensively within the Andean political, economic and cultural framework which produced it. It is also testimony to the power and the pleasure of research itself, undertaken at the highest level.
