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Medieval · The Americas · 500 - 1500 CE
The civilizations of the medieval Americas — from Aztec featherworkers to Inca master weavers — created textile traditions of astonishing complexity.
By Dan Schnau · Last updated
Clothing in the Americas between about 500 and 1500 CE ranged from fine woven cotton to feathered garments and tailored skins. Maya and Aztec weavers spun cotton and agave fiber and wove it on the backstrap loom.7 Wari weavers in the Andes made tapestry of camelid fiber and cotton, and Chimú weavers made tapestry and gauze.18,10 Ancestral Puebloans in the American Southwest wove cotton on upright looms and made blankets of turkey feathers and yucca cord.26,29 In the Arctic, Thule women sewed tailored caribou-hide parkas and waterproof sealskin boots.34
Few ancient Maya textiles survive because the wet climate destroys organic material, while the arid Andean world has preserved spectacular textiles from as early as 2400 BCE.7 The main sources are:
The Classic period in Mesoamerica ran from about 300 to 950 CE.17 Classic Maya painted pottery shows a basic male outfit built on the loincloth, usually white but sometimes red or black, with decorated ends.7 For formal occasions men wrapped a hip cloth over the loincloth and might add a matching head wrap.7 Nobles wore mid-length or long capes, and more elaborate ones were reserved for rulers and special officials.7
Battle scenes show short-sleeved tunics, a garment seen in the Classic Maya record only in battle dress.7 A Jaina Island figurine shows a warrior in either quilted cotton armor or the feathered uniform of a military order.21
Classic Maya women usually wore a wrap skirt with a blouse, or a long wrap tunic.7 Women's dress centered on the huipil, a slip-on, tunic-like blouse with a neck opening and no underarm seam, woven on a backstrap loom, often with elaborate brocaded or embroidered designs.7,8 The backstrap loom itself — portable and capable of producing incredibly fine cloth — was the primary weaving technology across Mesoamerica and remains in use today.7,8,20 Elite Maya women in formal rites wore a long black huipil patterned with white circles.7
The Bonampak murals in Chiapas, painted around 800 CE, show courtiers who dance in extravagant costumes, strip the clothing from fallen captives, and receive tribute.22 Cloth itself was wealth: painted vessels show stacks of folded mantles given as tribute and gifts, and Landa described cotton cloth as a means of paying debts and taxes.7
The textile arts of Mesoamerica reached extraordinary heights during the Postclassic period (c. 950–1521 CE).17 Among the Aztec (Mexica), clothing was regulated by sumptuary laws that restricted cotton clothing to the nobility, while capes could also be made of humbler maguey (agave) fiber.1,2 Men wore the tilmatli, a cloak fastened on one shoulder and described as the most important part of male dress; the finest capes, some of them feathered, could be reserved for the ruler alone.2 Warriors who captured enemies in battle earned the right to increasingly prestigious costume, such as feathered warrior suits and jaguar uniforms, and insignia were made with featherwork — mosaics of tropical bird feathers painstakingly fixed to backings such as netting or agave paper.1,3
Featherwork (amantecayotl, "the art of feather working") was a prestige art whose makers worked for the elite of the leading Aztec cities.3,5 Specialist artisans called amanteca, organized in guilds, created dazzling cloaks, headdresses, shields, and fans using feathers from birds such as the quetzal, macaw, cotinga, and roseate spoonbill.2,3,6 The long, iridescent green tail feathers of the quetzal dominate the last surviving headdress of its kind, now in Vienna, and such headdresses were associated with rulers, gods, and priests.3,4
For Mexica loincloths, capes, skirts, dress laws, and tribute cloth, see Aztec clothing.
For the earlier Paracas, Nasca, and Moche material, start with ancient Andean textile traditions.
By Inca times, Andean weaving had reached a technical level unsurpassed in the pre-industrial world.14 The Wari empire, which rose to power near modern Ayacucho and flourished c. 500–1000 CE, produced fine tapestry weave tunics with bold, highly abstract designs, worn by and buried with elite men, with some of the highest thread counts of any handwoven fabric.9,18
The repeated faces and stepped spirals on Wari tunics show how closely regulated the designs were.18 One sleeved tunic in Cleveland, with a bird-headed figure holding a staff, used more than twice the usual amount of yarn, some 19 miles of it, much of it dyed the dark blue that was the most prestigious Wari color.9 A cache of an estimated 96 panels covered in blue and yellow macaw feathers was found in the dry foothills of southern Peru, although the birds live in the Amazonian rainforest far to the east; what the panels were used for is still unknown.23
The subsequent Chimú kingdom continued this legacy, producing openwork gauze weaves, slit tapestry, and elaborately painted fabrics along Peru's northern coast.10,11
A Chimú ceremonial costume in Santiago, Chile, shows how such an outfit was worn: a long cloth wrapped into a turban, a wide, short sleeved tunic, and a breechcloth whose decorated end panel hung in front like a one-sided skirt.25,10 For the elite, Chimú weavers could also cover an entire garment in feathers.24
The Inca, who rose to power around Cusco in the 1400s and ruled until the Spanish conquest of 1532, made textile production a matter of state.14,19 The finest cloth was more precious than gold or silver.13,15 The finest textiles, called cumbi, were made by specialist weavers, including male cumbicamayoc ("keepers of the fine cloth") and acllas (chosen women) who lived in cloistered communities and wove fine cloth for the state.12,15,19 Finely woven interlocked tapestry garments were a privilege of the nobility; in one surviving tunic that was likely royal, the threads number roughly 100 per centimeter (about 250 per inch).13,19 The Inca also used textiles for record-keeping: the quipu, a device of knotted colored strings, recorded numerical and perhaps other kinds of information, making Andean cloth not merely a covering for the body but a medium of communication and governance.16
For the unku tunic, tocapu designs, and the cloth made by state weavers, see Inca clothing and textiles.
Cotton did not become important for Pueblo cloth until about 700 CE.26 Between 700 and 1100, weavers added cotton blankets, belts, breechcloths, shirts, kilts, and string aprons and skirts to older garments of plant fiber, hair, and fur.26 They are credited with developing the upright loom.26 In the Rio Grande Classic period (1325–1600), men in Frijoles Canyon, New Mexico, often wove cotton cloth on looms set up in cave rooms.28
Yucca was an important fiber. Its leaves were stripped and woven into sandals, baskets, and rope, and yucca twine twisted with turkey feathers or strips of rabbit fur made warm blankets.27 An early thirteenth-century blanket from southeastern Utah featured more than 11,000 turkey feathers woven into almost 200 yards of yucca cord.29 The researchers who studied it think that every member of a Pueblo community, from infants to adults, probably owned a turkey-feather blanket.29
Spiro, in eastern Oklahoma, was a major Mississippian ceremonial center from about 900 to 1400 CE, and its Craig Mound has produced the most extensive collection of preserved prehistoric textiles in the southeastern United States.30 Nearly all of the techniques used for the Spiro textiles could have been worked by finger manipulation: twining, interlacing, knotting, and wrapping, without a loom that both held the warp taut and opened a shed.30 Stone figures and engraved shells show men in kilt-like garments, hair worn in forelocks, buns, knots, and roaches, and fine geometric tattoos.31 Ornaments included ear spools, necklaces of shell beads, and the shell gorget, an ornament such as a carved shell disk hung on a cord around the neck.31 At Cahokia, deer hides and beaver pelts could be traded for marine shell.32
Thule culture developed in northern Alaska around 1000 CE and subsequently spread eastward across the North American Arctic, reaching Greenland around 1200 CE.36 Their leggings and parkas were usually made of caribou hide, whose hollow hairs trap insulating air.34 Three hooded gut-skin parkas from Nuulliit in northern Greenland, dated to the fourteenth century, show a cut with sleeve gussets and vertical gut-skin panels that Inuit used for at least 550 years.35
Weaving and sewing were often women's work. Sahagún called the fiber arts the foremost work of women in central Mexico, learned at a very early age.7 Thule women's sewing was as vital to survival as men's hunting.34 In the Pueblo villages of Frijoles Canyon, by contrast, men often wove.28
Among the Classic Maya, a person's social or political role decided the garment, its designs, and even its fiber and quality.7 Feathers for the Chimú tabard were carried across the Andes and would have been available only to the most elite members of society.24 Aztec law restricted cotton clothing to the nobility, and capes could also be made of humbler maguey fiber.1,2
Cotton was woven in Mesoamerica, on the Andean coast, and in the Southwest, alongside agave in Mesoamerica, camelid fiber in the Andes, and yucca in the Southwest.7,18,10,26,27
Maya dyes came from flowers, roots, bark, and fruit, from marine shellfish, from the dried bodies of the female cochineal insect, and from minerals and colored earths.7 Early Pueblo cloth was mostly the natural color of the fiber, with brown, white, and occasional reddish ochre, yellow, and black.26
The backstrap loom used in Mesoamerica was the same type used in the Andes.7 The upright loom spread cotton weaving in the Southwest.26 Arctic clothing was sewn, not woven: Thule women pierced skins with a bone awl and sewed them with a bone needle and caribou sinew.34
The Aztecs and Inca reserved cotton clothing and fine tapestry garments for the nobility.1,19 A distinctive pink-and-white tufted cape on Maya vases was reserved for those receiving war spoils, and it may have been feathered, since Spanish friars reported that feathered garments were reserved for warriors.7 The Wari seem to have reserved bird imagery on their finest tunics for their most exalted rulers.9
"Native Americans wore only animal skins." Cotton was woven from the Andes to the Southwest, where Ancestral Puebloans made cotton blankets, shirts, and kilts by 1100 CE.18,26,7
"Pants and sleeved shirts are traditional Maya men's clothes." Classic Maya men wore a loincloth and hip cloth. European pants replaced them after the conquest, because Native dress was discouraged or banned for men working in colonial institutions.7
"Arctic skin clothing was crude." Thule caribou-skin clothing was often finely tailored, light, and very warm, far better than the heavy woolens Europeans wore in the Arctic.34
