Inca Textiles, Crafts and Trade

The textile and metallurgical crafts of the Inca state were among the most sophisticated in the pre-industrial world, and the economy in which those crafts circulated was, in the words of the anthropologist John Murra, “the only major pre-capitalist state that functioned without markets, money, or the principle of exchange-value.” The Incas had inherited a long Andean tradition of textile production that stretched back to the Chavín and Paracas periods, and they refined it into a state-controlled industry of unparalleled scale. The state required every household to weave a fixed quota of cumbi cloth, prescribed the textile patterns that were woven into the cloth, regulated the colors in which the cloth was dyed, and collected the cloth as tribute. The same logic applied to metallurgy: the state controlled the production of gold, silver, and the copper-gold-silver alloy called tumbaga.

The place of cloth in the Inca world

In the Inca world, textiles stood at the very top of the hierarchy of material values. A cumbi tunic (uncu) of the finest alpaca wool, woven on a backstrap loom by a team of specialist weavers, was worth more than an equivalent weight of gold; the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega recorded that a single state tunic of cumbi cloth took perhaps three to four hundred hours of work to produce. The reason for this high valuation was social: textiles were the principal form in which the state paid its servants, the principal form in which it stored its wealth, and the principal form in which it presented itself to its gods. At the feast of Inti Raymi, the Sapa Inca was robed in a fresh cumbi tunic; at the funeral of a king, hundreds of cumbi textiles were burned as offerings; and in the principal shrines of the empire, the mummies of dead rulers were wrapped in fresh cloth at regular intervals.

The state maintained a strict hierarchy of textile quality. Q’ara cloth was the rough, undyed cloth of commoners, woven from llama wool and used for everyday clothing and household use. Awasqa cloth was of intermediate quality, woven from a llama-alpaca blend and used for the clothing of state servants and for many ritual purposes. Q’ompi (or cumbi) was the finest cloth, woven from the wool of the alpaca or, in the most prestigious examples, the vicuña, and reserved for the Sapa Inca, the royal panacas, and the highest nobility. The detailed treatment of these grades and the social relations they encoded is given in Inca textile patterns and t’oqapu symbolism; the principal archival source is the visita of 1558 to the province of Huánuco, which records the specific quotas of cumbi and q’ara cloth owed by each ayllu.

Looms, fibers, and the organization of weaving

The Inca loom was a backstrap loom, consisting of two horizontal bars between which the warp threads were stretched, with one bar attached to a post or a tree and the other to a strap that passed around the weaver’s back. The weaver — typically a woman, although men wove the highest-quality cumbi — sat on the ground and used her body weight to control the tension of the warp. The loom was portable, and women wove at home, in the fields during rest periods, and at the sites of communal labor. The backstrap loom is itself a pre-Inca technology, attested in the archaeological record from at least the Paracas period (c. 800 BC), and the Incas did not modify it in any essential way. What they did modify was the scale and organization of production: the state required every household to contribute a fixed quota of woven cloth, and the provincial administration used quipucamayocs to record the deliveries and to compute the household’s labor obligations.

The fibers used in Inca textiles were of three principal kinds. Cotton was grown in the warm coastal valleys below 2,500 meters and was used for everyday clothing. Llama wool — coarse and strong — was used for the woven bags (q’epi) in which food and goods were carried, for the ropes of the Qhapaq Ñan bridges, and for the rough cloth of the q’ara class. Alpaca wool — finer, softer, and warmer — was used for the high-quality cumbi cloth of the elite. The wool of the wild vicuña was reserved exclusively for the Sapa Inca and for the Temple of the Sun; vicuña-wool textiles were the most expensive in the empire, and the state maintained a monopoly on the capture and shearing of vicuña herds, which were rounded up at intervals of two to four years in elaborate chaku (roundup) ceremonies.

The state organized the exchange of these fibers through a system of mit’a labor: coastal ayllus sent cotton, highland ayllus sent llama and alpaca wool, and the central administration wove the fibers into the cloth that was then distributed across the empire. The detail of this system is treated in Inca trade and exchange without coined money.

T’oqapu, color, and the symbolism of cloth

The most distinctive feature of Inca cloth was the use of geometric patterns called t’oqapu — small, square, often highly abstract motifs arranged in a grid on the surface of the textile. The t’oqapu of the late Inca period are known from the surviving fragments of state cumbi tunics, from the colonial-era paintings of the chroniclers, and from the quipus of the early colonial period, which often carry t’oqapu as a form of identifying marker. The meaning of individual t’oqapu is debated: some scholars, following the work of John Murra and Gary Urton, have argued that the t’oqapu functioned as a kind of emblem or coat-of-arms identifying the ayllu or panaca of the weaver; others, following the more recent work of Sabine Hyland, have argued that the t’oqapu carried narrative content related to the myths and histories of the lineage. What is clear is that the t’oqapu was a state-controlled semiotic system: certain t’oqapu were reserved for the Sapa Inca and the royal panacas, and the unauthorized use of a royal t’oqapu was a serious offense.

Dyeing was a sophisticated chemical process. The principal red dye was cochineal (chinak’urku, Dactylopius coccus), a parasitic insect that lived on the prickly pear cactus and was cultivated in the warm valleys of the south; the principal yellow dye was q’illu (Baccharis), a plant of the highland; the principal blue dye was ch’illka (Indigofera), a plant of the lower elevations; and the principal green dye was a mixture of ch’illka and q’illu. A range of mineral and plant sources provided other hues, and the combination of dyes with different mordants (typically alum from the deposits at Cotabamba) produced a wide range of color values. Some colors — particularly the deep blue of the makis and the red of the warak’ay — were reserved for the Sapa Inca and the highest nobility, and the unauthorized use of these colors was punishable by death. The detailed treatment of t’oqapu symbolism and the chemistry of Inca dyeing is given in Inca textile patterns and t’oqapu symbolism.

Metallurgy: gold, silver, and tumbaga

The second great craft of the Inca state was metallurgy. The Incas had inherited a tradition of metalworking that stretched back to the Chavín and Moche periods, and they refined it into a sophisticated industry of gold, silver, and the copper-gold-silver alloy called tumbaga. Gold was associated with the mascaipacha (royal headdress) and with the sweat of the sun; silver was associated with the moon (Mama Killa) and with tears. The qori kamayoq (gold workers) and qollqa kamayoq (silversmiths) were full-time specialists attached to the Sapa Inca and to the Temple of the Sun, organized into hereditary corporations and divided into provincial workshops.

The most famous examples of Inca metalwork were the “gardens” of the Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun in Cusco. The chroniclers describe fields of golden maize, silver llamas, and golden and silver figurines of people and animals that the Sapa Inca and his predecessors had dedicated to the sun; the most extravagant account, by the soldier-chronicler Pedro Sancho de la Hoz (1534), recorded that the gardens contained more than 200 life-sized figures of golden animals and 20 life-sized figures of golden people. Most of this treasure was melted down by the Spanish in 1533–1534, but a substantial portion survived in the form of small ritual objects. The Museo del Oro in Lima, the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, and the British Museum hold substantial collections of Inca metalwork.

The tumbaga alloy

A distinctive feature of Inca metallurgy was the use of the copper-gold-silver alloy called tumbaga. Tumbaga, which had been known in the Andes since the Moche period, was produced by smelting copper ore together with gold and silver, and it could be polished to a wide range of colors depending on the proportion of the three metals. The Incas used tumbaga for ornamental and ritual objects — tumi knives, plaques, headdresses, chaquira (beadwork), and figurines — and the alloy was particularly prized for its resemblance to gold when polished. The detailed treatment of the chemistry and working of tumbaga is given in Inca metallurgy: gold, silver, and tumbaga; the principal modern studies are those of Heather Lechtman.

The Incas practiced four principal techniques of metalworking. Cold hammering — pounding the metal cold with stone tools — was used to harden the surface of gold and silver objects. Annealing was used to relieve stresses induced by hammering. Depletion gilding — repeated cycles of hammering, annealing, and acid-etching with plant juices — was used to produce a surface of nearly pure gold on tumbaga objects. And Lost-wax casting — pouring molten metal into a wax model that was then melted out — was used to produce figurines and small ornaments. These techniques required a substantial specialized workforce, and the qori kamayoq of the empire’s principal workshops — at Cusco, at Tumebamba, and at the southern province of Collagua — were among the most highly trained artisans in the pre-industrial world.

The economy without money

The Inca economy is best understood not as a market economy but as a system of redistribution without money. Goods flowed from producers to state stores (qollqas) and from those stores to soldiers, priests, and ritual specialists in a pattern dictated by the state. Within that framework, the trueque (barter) of goods and services between households and between communities was a constant: at the time of the conquest the empire was moving tens of thousands of tons of food, cloth, and metal per year along its 40,000-kilometer road system, and the architecture of state storage at the major provincial centers — particularly the 700-plus qollqas at Huánuco Pampa — reflects this capacity. The detailed analysis of the redistributive economy, and the comparison with other pre-capitalist states, is given in Inca trade and exchange without coined money.

The redistributive system was anchored in three institutions. First, the mit’a labor obligation: every household owed the state a fixed amount of labor each year, which was the principal form in which work for the roads, terraces, and qollqas was organized. Second, the tribute in kind obligation: every household owed the state a fixed quota of textiles, food, and other commodities, which were stored in the qollqas and used to pay the empire’s servants. Third, the state store itself: the qollqa was the principal institution through which goods were accumulated, stored, and redistributed. The detailed treatment is given in Inca trade and exchange without coined money.

Markets and trueque

Despite the absence of a market economy in the European sense, the Incas did permit local markets (trueque) in certain commodities, particularly food. The most important of these markets was held in the open square of Cusco every week, and the chronicler Murúa recorded that hundreds of vendors gathered there to exchange food, small animals, and household goods. The markets of provincial towns were similar in scale and function, and they were held on fixed days, with the curaca of the local ayllu responsible for maintaining order. The state regulated the markets closely, fixing the prices of certain staples (notably maize) and prohibiting the sale of certain commodities (notably coca leaf) outside the state stores. The markets were, in effect, supplements to the redistributive system: they allowed the population to acquire small quantities of goods that the state did not distribute.

The khipu and the accounting of goods

The accounting of goods within the redistributive system was maintained by the quipu (also khipu), a complex knotted-cord device of which several hundred examples survive in museums from Lima to Berlin. The quipu consisted of a primary cord from which a series of pendant cords hung, each cord carrying knots tied in specific positions to record decimal orders of magnitude, color, and, in the latest work of Gary Urton and Sabine Hyland, a substantial amount of narrative information in the form of mnemonics. The system was, in effect, a three-dimensional data storage device that recorded population counts, tribute assessments, military rosters, agricultural yields, and the calendar. The detailed treatment of the quipu is given in Quipu and record-keeping. The quipucamayocs were an hereditary caste of specialists, and many were preserved in colonial office in the 1560s and 1570s as village record-keepers.

The crafts and the colonial transition

The Spanish conquest of 1532 and the subsequent introduction of European industries transformed the Andean crafts. The Spanish brought with them the spindle, the horizontal treadle loom, the wheel-thrown potter’s wheel, the iron tool, and the European tradition of wool processing. The obrajes — European-style textile workshops — were established in the 1540s and 1550s in cities such as Quito, Cusco, and Arequipa, and they gradually displaced the traditional Andean textile industry. The metallurgical industry, similarly, was transformed. The Spanish established a series of silver refineries (ingenios) in the highlands, of which the most famous was the one at Potosí in present-day Bolivia. The redistribution system of the empire was replaced by the encomienda, the repartimiento, and ultimately the hacienda; the state qollqas were taken over by the colonial administration and gradually fell into disuse. The persistence of the Andean textile tradition in the comunidades campesinas of the present day is one of the most remarkable examples of cultural continuity in the Americas.