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Ancient Cultural Contacts between Ecuador, West Mexico, and the American Southwest: Clothing Similarities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Patricia Rieff Anawalt
Patricia Rieff Anawalt*
Affiliation:
Center for the Study of Regional Dress, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024
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Abstract

Clothing styles, design motifs, and techniques of cloth production found in codex illustrations and on pottery and extant textile fragments suggest diffusion of culture traits from the northern coast of South America to West Mexico and on into the American Southwest. The non-mesoamerican garments depicted in a West Mexican sixteenth-century manuscript and on mortuary figurines buried more than 1,000 years earlier in an adjacent area find analogs only in styles that were present in Ecuador from 1500 B. C. up to the time of Spanish contact. Clothing and textile design motifs represented on figures found in the West Mexican shaft tombs of Ixtlán del Río, Nayarit, indicate that these parallels existed as early as 400 B. C. A variety of other data suggest that intermittent maritime contact persisted between Ecuador and West Mexico through the intervening period and into the sixteenth century.

El estilo del vestido, los diseños decorativos y las técnicas de producción ilustrados en los códices, la cerámica y en fragmentos de tejidos sugieren la difusión de elementos culturales de la costa norte de Sudamérica a la parte oeste de México y al suroeste de los Estados Unidos. Los trajes de origen no-mesoamericano ilustrados en un manuscrito del siglo dieciséis, proveniente del oeste de México, y los mostrados en figuritas depositadas en tumbas más de un milenio antes, tienen analogía sólo con los estilos del vestido presentes en Ecuador desde 1500 A. C. hasta el momento del contacto con los Españoles. La ropa y los diseños decorativos representados en las tumbas en forma de bota de Ixtlán del Río, en Nayarit, indican que estos paralelos existían tan temprano como 400 A. C. Otra información diversa sugiere que hubieron persistentes contactos marítimos entre el Ecuador y el oeste de México durante todo este período y que continuaron hasta el siglo dieciséis.

Type
Articles
Information
Latin American Antiquity , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 114 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Society for American Archaeology 1992

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