Elayne Zorn’s research while affiliated with University of Central Florida and other places

Textiles formed a major part of any ancient Mesoamerican economy. Based on ethnohistory and iconography, the Maya were great producers of cloth for both internal and external use. However, the archaeological identification of textile production is difficult in any tropical area because of issues of preservation. This paper examines the evidence for the production and distribution of cloth that is found in the pre-Columbian Maya area and then focuses on archaeological data relative to textiles from the ancient Maya city of Caracol, Belize. Archaeology at Caracol has been carried out annually from 1985 to the present and has resulted in the collection of data that permits insight into the economic production and social distribution of cloth at the site. This is accomplished through examining the contexts and distributions of spindle whorls, bone needles, bone pins and hairpins, bone awls, and limestone bars. All of these artifacts can be related to weaving, netting, or cloth in some way. Importantly, perforated ceramic disks are not included in this grouping because of contextual information from the archaeological record that these artifacts likely functioned as backings for ear assemblages. Spindle whorls are the artifacts most clearly associated with textile production and 57 of these have been recovered at Caracol, 38 of them in 20 different burials. Several of these interments are of high-status women placed in the most important architectural constructions at the site. The contextual placement of these burials stresses not only the link between women and weaving, but also the high status associated with such an activity, thus signaling the importance of cloth and spinning in ancient Maya society. The prevalence of female interments in the major ritual buildings at Caracol also reflects the importance of women to Maya social structure during the Classic period (a.d. 250–900), pointing to difficulties in hieroglyphically based interpretations of ancient Maya social organization and suggesting that the traditional focus on males in the sociopolitical organization of the Classic Maya is incorrect.

This study provides a long-term, ethnographic assessment of the development, management, and decline of communitarian tourism in the rural Peruvian indigenous community of Taquile Island, focusing on relations between hosts and outsider brokers/mediators. To date, relationships with outsider tour operators and guides have generally been acrimonious due to competition over control of transportation and the type of tourism outsiders have promoted. Nonetheless, Taquile’s initiative was at first successful because of help from a hitherto unresearched group of individual foreigners. The study points to the need for further investigation of the potential impact of this type of broker/mediator, particularly vis-à-vis public-sector investment and development.RésuméTourisme communautarien: hôtes et médiateurs au Pérou. Cette étude présente une évaluation ethnographique à long terme du développement, gestion et déclin du tourisme communautarien dans la communauté indigène péruvienne rurale de l’île de Taquile, en particulier des relations entre hôtes et médiateurs/agents externes. Jusqu’à présent, les relations avec voyagistes et guides externes ont été généralement acrimonieux dû à la compétition pour le contrôle des transports et au genre de tourisme promu par les gens de l’extérieur. Pourtant, l’initiative de l’île de Taquile a eu du succès au début grâce à l’aide d’un groupe de personnes externes qu’on n’avait pas étudié auparavant. L’étude montre le besoin de faire plus de recherches sur l’impact éventuel de ce genre d’agent/médiateur, surtout en ce qui concerne le développement et l’investissement du secteur public.

In studying the past, archaeologists examine change and continuity over time, but physical processes that affect the preservation of material remains make fine sequencing, at the level of decades, difficult or impossible. Cultural anthropologists and others who study present-day material culture frequently conduct short-term fieldwork, which makes it difficult or impossible to reliably study transformations over time. One solution to this problem is long-term ethnographic fieldwork, combining synchronic and diachronic data collection, to study processes of change and continuity in the production of individual weavers and extended families over generations, in communities and regions. This paper is a preliminary analysis of three decades (1976-2006) of belt weaving on Taquile Island, in Lake Titicaca, Peru, based on two years of anthropological ethnographic fieldwork during a 30-year period. Taquile is one of the few communities in highland Peru where indigenous, Quechua-speaking people still produce and wear handwoven textiles on a daily basis (fig. 1). (Quechua is the Inca language). Taquile has experienced enormous changes recently, resulting from the commercialization of their textiles starting in 1968, and the development of tourism starting in 1976. Here, I provide a brief examination of some aspects of the textile style of this community by examining several belts woven by three generations of women in one extended family; I also document a recent modification to the traditional loom used to weave these belts. The discussion of change in one area of material culture (textiles), one type of textile (belts), woven by one extended family, in one community (Taquile), shows that in the short period of 30 years a community style changed in the areas of technology (materials, loom type, weave structures), uses (personal and family use; sale), and meanings (internal vs. external; use and exchange vs. commodification or commercialization). Yet, there was continuity in all of these areas, such that the overwhelming majority of belts woven in the 21st century can be relatively easily identified, even by the textile-illiterate, as coming from this community. Such analysis illustrates why longterm ethnographic research is essential to understand the messages that Andean weavers communicate.

This article examines contemporary Peruvian tapestry in its historical context. Though tapestry production represents a significant source of income for weavers in Ayacucho, Peru, the contemporary industry has not yet been studied in the context of long-term Andean textile traditions and their historical transformations. Ayacucho is home to numerous crafts traditions, but also terrible violence during Peru’s undeclared civil war (1980–95), which started there. The paper provides an overview of contemporary Andean textiles, emphasizing differences between textiles woven on the pre-Hispanic type Andean loom, and those such as tapestry woven on the Hispanic-type treadle loom. The technology of Andean textile production (loom types, materials, yarn production, dyeing) is discussed. Andean tapestry is traced from its earliest appearances ca. 500 B.C., through its fluorescence in the Wari and Tiahuanaco empires, and the Inca empire, and production during the colonial and the little-known 19th century Republican period, with a focus on Ayacucho. The paper then analyzes Andean cloth today, especially forces leading weavers to stop making textiles. The final section presents a preliminary history of 20th century Ayacucho tapestry production, based on interviews with weavers and their family, and non-weavers involved in crafts development. It examines the work of individual weavers within social and political contexts in terms of violence and democracy in Ayacucho. The paper also examines how gender and race affect tapestry by analyzing the gendered division of labor in the tapestry industry, in which very few women weave, and the racism faced by weavers of indilgenous origin.

The people of Taquile Island on the Peruvian side of beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas, are renowned for the hand-woven textiles that they both wear and sell to outsiders. One thousand seven hundred Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, who depend on potatoes and the fish from the lake, host the forty thousand tourists who visit their island each year. Yet only twenty-five years ago, few tourists had even heard of Taquile. In Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island, Elayne Zorn documents the remarkable transformation of the isolated rocky island into a community-controlled enterprise that now provides a model for indigenous communities worldwide. Over the course of three decades and nearly two years living on Taquile Island, Zorn, who is trained in both the arts and anthropology, learned to weave from Taquilean women. She also learned how gender structures both the traditional lifestyles and the changes that tourism and transnationalism have brought. In her comprehensive and accessible study, she reveals how Taquileans used their isolation, landownership, and communal organizations to negotiate the pitfalls of globalization and modernization and even to benefit from tourism. This multi-sited ethnography set in Peru, Washington, D.C., and New York City shows why and how cloth remains central to Andean society and how the marketing of textiles provided the experience and money for Taquilean initiatives in controlling tourism. The first book about tourism in South America that centers on traditional arts as well as community control, Weaving a Future will be of great interest to anthropologists and scholars and practitioners of tourism, grassroots development, and the fiber arts.

Textiles formed a major part of any ancient Mesoamerican economy. Based on ethnohistory and iconography, the Maya were great producers of cloth for both internal and external use. However, the archaeological identification of textile production is difficult in any tropical area because of issues of preservation. This paper examines the evidence for the production and distribution of cloth that is found in the pre-Columbian Maya area and then focuses on archaeological data relative to textiles from the ancient Maya city of Caracol, Belize. Archaeologyat Caracol has been carried out annually from 1985 to the present and has resulted in the collection of datathat permits insight into the economic production and social distribution of cloth at the site. This is accomplished through examining the contexts and distributions of spindle whorls, bone needles, bone pins and hairpins, bone awls, and limestone bars. All of these artifacts can be related to weaving, netting, or cloth in some way. Importantly, perforated ceramic disks are not included in this grouping because of contextual information from the archaeological record that these artifacts likely functioned as backings for ear assemblages. Spindle whorls are the artifacts most clearly associated with textile production and 57 of these have been recovered at Caracol, 38 of them in 20 different burials. Several of these interments are of high-status women placed in the most important architectural constructions at the site. The contextual placement of these burials stresses not only the link between women and weaving, but also the high status associated with such an activity, thus signaling the importance of cloth and spinning in ancient Maya society. The prevalence of female interments in the major ritual buildings at Caracol also reflects the importance of women to Maya social structure during the Classic period (A.D. 250-900), pointing to difficulties in hieroglyphically based interpretations of ancient Maya social organization and suggesting that the traditional focus on males