Keeping Nasca Time: The Brooklyn Museum Textile as a 365-Day Calendar

Abstract: The exquisite 2000-year-old Early Nasca textile from the Brooklyn Museum, 38.121, provides a focus for examining recent theories about Andean mathematics, textiles, and geometries of space and time. Completely reversible, the Brooklyn Museum textile has a sheer central cloth decorated with warp-wrapped designs, framed by an elaborate, three-dimensional border executed in cross-knit looping. Ninety-two tiny costumed figures parade along the border, marching in four single-file lines. The center’s embedded designs are visible from both faces, and the triple-layered border is duplicated on both sides, with matching veneers of crossed-knit looping. Each border figure reflects on either face. However, three errant figures have a front and a back. Throughout Andean prehistory, perfect reversibility, often virtuosic, marks fine textiles. This suggests that mirrored, two-sided designs express “wholeness”; they match like a pair of touching hands. The three front-back figures, then, are incomplete on the verso (like a single hand). By this logic, when the cloth is turned over, and the backs of the figures are revealed, the front-back border figures might count as one or zero, depending on the circumstances. For instance, if we accept that the fabric has ninety-two figures, and each figure might represent a day, the textile would represent roughly one-fourth of a year (92 × 4 = 368). If, however, we consider that each quarter of the fabric represents a different starting point in the counting of a solar year, then we could consider a scenario where the front-back figures are not counted when the quarter they belong to begins the count. The result would then total some configuration of: 92 + 90 + 92 + 91 = 365. Some traditional Andean calendars quarter the year at solstices and equinoxes; the recent identification of the Chankillo monument on Peru’s North Coast as a solar observatory proves that these time-reckoning methods predate the Nasca by centuries. The organization of the year into four parts meshes with enduring Andean notions of space and time, and the structure of four-selvedge cloths. These parallels are highlighted throughout the Brooklyn Museum textile, whose materials, structures, colors, and iconography all recursively model similar four-part schemes of ordered energy.