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Lynn A. Meisch, Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology, St. Mary's College of California, Moraga, CA 94575
Coya Belts: Documentation of an Unbroken Inca Weaving
Tradition
in the Huamachuco Region of
We
dedicate our paper to the late John Rowe and Ed Franquemont, with
thanks for
their encouragement and support of our work.
In
the late sixteenth century, a Mercedarian friar Martín de
Murúa was sent to
Murúa’s
1611 Historia general includes a code for weaving a belt. In
his words
it is a “Memorandum of a famous belt of llipi or cumbi,
which was
only worn by the coyas in the sara (corn) festivals; it
has 104
[warps] and their duplicates. Eight are at the extremities, four on one
side
and four on the other” (Meisch translation). The 24-line code is
complex, with
12 lines for heddles (“Yllaba”) alternating with lines of numbers and
the
letters a, c, e and v.
In
a brilliant piece of textile detective work in 1984, French researcher
Sophie
Derossier wove two examples of the belt using different double-faced
techniques. She did not believe multiple heddles were involved, and
picked the
design by hand. What confirmed the belt’s structure was her discovery
of a
pre-Hispanic Peruvian belt in the
Coya
is frequently glossed as queen, the principal wife of the Inca. In the
later
years of the empire when the Inca married his full-sister, coya
referred
to both his wife and his daughters (Julien 2000: 311). Corn, called sara
in Quechua, was highly valued not only by the Incas, but by indigenous
people
throughout the empire. It was used ritually in various forms and burned
as
offerings. There was even a maize garden attached to the Coricancha in
Because
Murúa mentioned that the highest-ranking Inca noblewomen wore
the belts during
the corn festivals,
Various
chroniclers have described corn planting and harvesting rituals, and
the
extensive ceremonial use of maize and chicha in the
For
both the harvesting and planting of maize, the Inca and his nobles used
golden
foot plows in a field at the edge of Cusco. This belonged to the mummy
of Mama
Hauco, one of the women who accompanied legendary first Inca to
Nobility and common people observed
another major feature of the corn harvest: the saramama (corn
mother)
ritual, but it was a household, rather than public, observance. People
chose a
corncob that had been most productive, placed it ceremonially in a
small
granary and watched over it for three nights. They dressed this corn in
the
richest garments they owned, held it in great veneration, called it the
mother
of maize, and said that this rite preserved the corn crop.
Such
cobs are still valued. In 1996, in
Until
recently, there were no known contemporary examples of the corn belts,
that is,
belts with the four-colored motifs and a structure like the one woven
by
Derossiers based on the Murúa manuscript, and the belt in the
AMNH. However,
during our first team field trip in January 2002,
A
major goal of our July-August 2004 fieldwork was to locate a coya
belt
weaver. Both females and males weave on the backstrap loom in the
Huamachuco
region. Some textiles are woven by both sexes, for example saddlebags,
but only
females weave belts. We showed coya belts to local people, who
told us
such belts were used to swaddle babies, and were worn by pregnant
women, and by
men doing agricultural work to protect their backs, but we could not
find an
actual weaver.
In
August 2004, Joe and our Peruvian research assistant Horacio Rodriguez
encountered Sra. Catalina Sánchez of Tulpo, who learned to weave
coya
belts from her aunt. Sra. Catalina said that the motifs on the belts
were “kingu
clavel” (zig-zag and carnation) but the belt was “sarita”
and it was
woven with multiple heddles. We were stunned when she called it a sara
or corn belt. Quechua is no longer spoken in this region and people do
not
associate the word sara with the Spanish maíz.
And Murúa was
right about the heddles.
Sra
Catalina had a sampler with sticks that indicated the heddles for the
designs
on sarita and rosita belts. The sarita sampler
has 106 warp
pairs while Murúa mentioned 104, another significant continuity.
Although it
has only two colors, Sra. Catalina said the sampler indicated the
heddling for
a four-color belt. That the belt had retained its association with corn
since
Inca times and was actually called a corn belt is nothing short of
amazing,
given the colonial campaigns to extirpate idolatry.
In
October 2004, Joe and Horacio returned to Sra. Catalina, who had a
partly-woven
sarita belt on the loom, with 20 heddles and 2 lease sticks,
giving her
at least six more heddles than we expected based on the Murúa
manuscript and
her sampler. Moreover, there were only 92 warp pairs on Sra.Catalina’s
loom
making it narrower than Murúa’s code indicated; there is an
element of personal
choice involved. In October and December, Joe and Horacio visited two sarita
belt weavers in Cochamarca, 44-year-old Sra. Luisa Guevara Ascote, who
was born
in Tulpo, and her daughter, 14-year-old Ysenia Gonzáles. Sra.
Luisa said her
great-grandmother, grandmother and mother wove sarita belts,
and that
they handed down the name. She said the belt was called “sarita”
because
the diamond-shaped motif is made up of four different colors. All the
weavers
were adamant that sarita belts must have four colors.
During
the October visit Ysenia was weaving a sarita belt by hand,
carefully
picking each pattern row, rather than using multiple heddles. She
called
this “counting.” Apparently her mother
considered it essential that Ysenia learn how to count and handpick the
warps in
preparation for weaving with multiple heddles. In this region, people’s
belts
are burned when they die. As long as younger generations learn to weave
these
belts, the tradition will not disappear, hence our delight in
discovering that
Ysenia could weave sarita. When Joe and Horacio returned to
Cochamarca
in December, Sra. Luisa had another sarita belt on the loom
with 12
design heddles, exactly the number given by Murúa.
Today
the sarita belt is a palimpsest, or perhaps a Rorschach test,
with
different people finding a variety of motifs in the overall geometric
patterning, foregrounding and backgrounding different parts of the
design.
Local people also use a primarily Spanish vocabulary for these motifs,
which
refer to plants introduced from
For
the Incas, the sara-ness may have resided in the particular
colors in
the belt, which suggests that the AMNH belt was not a sara
belt. Or, the
sara-ness may reside in the four-colored geometric patterning
and weave
structure, and high status in the dyes, so that any woman could wear a
belt
with this design and structure during the corn festivals, but only coyas
could wear dyed belts or ones containing vicuña or gold yarn. We
think the
second is most likely: the four-color repeated design and weave
structure
conveyed an association with corn, although we cannot know how the
Incas
conceptualized this.
That
a belt with abstract geometric patterning is called a corn belt raises
fundamental questions about our ability to interpret other Inca motifs
such as
the abstract or geometric tukapu on tunics and mantles.
Europeans and
Americans think of meaning in visual art as encoded in
representational,
realistic forms. We are so enculturated to this view that it is hard
for us to
think otherwise, and it is implicit in our art history terminology:
iconography. We would not know that the coya belt was called a sara
belt or was associated with corn without someone telling us, and we can
only
lament how much knowledge has been lost with the colonial “extirpations
of
idolatry.”
Murúa’s
code for the weaving of the coya belt involves four colors: a,
c, e, and
v. Derossiers was unable to make a conclusive match between
Murúa’s code
letters and Spanish, Quechua or Aymara color terms, but she suggested,
based on
Spanish, the possible color scheme of yellow, purple, red and green,
and all of
which are Andean maize colors. Yellow is the color of both the sun and
ripe
corn and the leaves are green, as are the kernels before they ripen.
Andean
maize also comes in such colors as light orange and light yellow or
cream, as
cobs of a single color or as cobs with multiple colors. Given the
association
of maize with coyas, our first supposition was that some
combination of
these colors appeared in the coya belts.
On
the other hand, the association may not be with colors, but with
varieties or
categories of maize. For example, corn called “chochoca” in the
belt
area is dark yellow. Guaman Poma listed different maize varieties
including oque (gray) and paro (yellow). The “v” in Murúa’s manuscript
may
refer to vicuña fiber, which is tawny, and highly valued in its
natural state.
We know of no archaeological, colonial or ethnographic textiles where
vicuña is
dyed. Indígenas today refer to golden-tan colors as
“vicuña.” Similarly, in the
Huamachuco region people use “cotton” as a synonym for white because it
is so
much whiter than cream-colored sheep’s wool. In both instances, a fiber
term
also serves as a color term. These examples illustrate the difficulty
in
decoding Murua’s letters.
Colonial
definitions of cumpi are also confusing. Acosta wrote of cumbi,
“They work with two faces (dos haces) all the designs
they want,
so that neither a thread nor its end can be seen in anywhere in a
piece” (1979
[1590]: 210; Meisch translation). Desrosiers noted that scholars have
interpreted cumpi to refer to doubled-faced tapestry weaves.
The coya
belts, however, are not tapestry, which is weft-faced, but a
complementary-warp
weave. The warps predominate on the surface, and each warp has its
partner.
When one warp appears on the front of the belt its partner appears on
the back,
giving two complete faces. Desrosiers suggested that the definition of cumpi
needed to be enlarged to include fine, doubled-faced textiles of
various weave
structures, since Murúa is clear that the corn belt is cumpi.
We agree
with Desrosier.
How
did the coya belts arrive and survive in Huamachuco and particularly in
the
southwest corner of the province? There were mitmaq and a
temple of the
sun in Huamachuco; temples of the sun had an associated acclawasi.
The
Incas sacrificed fine textiles on ritual occasions by burning them or
throwing
them in rivers, and they exacted textile tribute from the provinces.
One way
the belts may have arrived in the north was with mamakuna from
A
second way may have been with highland mitmaq. In the
Huamachuco region,
mitmaq included Huayacuntus, Incas from
Linguistically,
it seems clear that the sarita belt was brought by the Incas,
as sara
is the Cuzco Quechua term for maize, while south of Huamachuco in
Ancash it is jara.
Cuzco Quechua is a completely different language from Ancash Quechua.
If the
belt pre-dated the Inca presence in Huamachuco, we would expect it to
be called
a jara or jarita belt.
Why
did the belts survive in the Huamachuco region and not elsewhere?
First, corn
was extremely important in local agriculture and there were a number of
wakas
and rituals concerning maize. The Agustinian missionaries in Huamachuco
in the
mid-16th century listed the various local “idols” or “huacas.”
There were at least ten related to corn, from mama aswa (mother
chicha)
and Vuigaicho and Vnstiqui, local and regional huacas of the
maize
harvest, animals and community; to Chuchucoc, an Andean huaca
of
agriculture and fecundity (chart of the wakas in de San Pedro
1992
[1560]: no pagination, but following 229; Meisch translation). Chochoca,
incidentally, a Hispanicization of chuchucoc, is the name of
corn grown
in the belt area today. Other corn wakas included Condor, an
Imperial
Inca huaca who protected coca and maize; and Pachamama,
the
pan-Andean waka of the earth, fertility and protection. In the
autochthonous Huamachuco creation myth, Ataguju, the creator god, was
worshipped when the corn was flowering, and he was asked for an
abundant crop
and implored to prevent hail. His servant Huamansuri was worshipped
when people
shelled the ears of corn. Yellow is the color of both the sun and ripe
corn and
the leaves are green, as are the kernels before they ripen. Maize wakas
were worshipped in the region, and festivals in honor of these would
have been
opportunities for the female mitmaq to wear their sara
belts.
The
Spanish considered indigenous wakas and rituals pagan and
repugnant. In
Father Arriaga’s The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru,
the visitor
general to indigenous communities in the early 17th century
was
commanded to ask questions specifically related to corn, including
keeping zaramamas
(1968 [1621]: 166-168). Such colonial
cultural and religious repression by the Spanish was especially
stringent in
the
Second,
the survivals of Inca dress have all been in more remote areas, and the
Huamachuco region qualifies in that regard. The sarita belts
did not
survive closer to Huamachuco city where the Agustinians were based.
Moreover,
the belts were (and are) woven by women, and such private, female,
household
activities often escaped prying eyes. What remains today of
pre-Hispanic Andean
Miraculously,
in several communities in the northern highlands, both the belt-weaving
technique encoded by Murúa and the belts’ association with corn
have survived
as the only documented, unbroken Inca weaving tradition.
________________________________
Acosta,
José de
1979
[1590] Historia
natural y moral de las
Arriaga,
Father Pablo Joseph
de
1968 [1621] The
Extirpation of Idolatry in
de
San Pedro, Fray Juan
1992 [1560] La
persecución`
Desrosiers,
Sophie
1986
An
Interpretation of Technical Weaving Data Found in an Early 17th-Century
Chronicle.
In: The Junius B. Bird Conference on Andean Textiles, April
7th and
8th, 1984. Ann Pollard
Rowe, ed.,
Espinoza
Soriano, Waldemar
1970
Los mitmas
Hyauacuntus en Cajabamba y Antamarca siglos XV y XVI. Historia y
cultura:
revista
Guaman
Poma de Ayala, Felipe
1980
[1615] El
Primer corónica y buen gobierno. 3 Vols. Jaime L. Urioste,
trans., John
Murra and Rolena Adorno, eds.
Julien,
Catherine
2000
Reading Inca History.