Fleece

The archaeological and historical records of the Andean region of South America hold plenty of evidence of the economic, political, and ritual importance of textiles in the ancient Andes. In the coastal regions textiles were primarily made from cotton, but in the Andean highlands, from where the Incas expanded their realm in the century prior to the European invasion, the favored raw material for textile production was camelid ¹ fleece (A. Rowe 1997: 6; Boytner 2004: 133). Setting the phenomenon of late pre-Hispanic textile production into an analytical framework of ecologically unequal exchange, I will approach what we might call the political ecology of fleece in the Andes from a new angle, and make an attempt at measuring quantitatively how much land and labor – space and time – Inca textile production demanded and from whom. Looking not only at the cultural aspects of textile production and consumption in the Inca empire, but also at its more tangible biophysical aspects, we shall see how cultural strategies of domination are manifested in the material landscape, and thus how ancient as well as present-day landscapes can be read and understood as reflections of cultural strategies of power and domination.