When the lords of the Inca were forced to send tribute to the Spanish, they made their payments, in part, in panes de grana — “cakes” or “loaves” of the cactus-eating cochineal beetle (magno or macnu in Quechua), which when pulverized and mixed with mordant produces a blood-red pigment whose intensity was unrivaled by anything previously known to Europeans. Since long before Pizarro’s invasion, Andean peoples from the coastal deserts to the highlands had been perfecting a range of techniques for creating, coloring, and otherwise ornamenting textiles. Colonial accounts and archaeological finds offer a glimpse of this complexity: regimented and ritualized dyestuff harvesting, designated “chosen women” (aklla) tasked with weaving for the Inca ruler, and selectively bred alpacas and llamas capable of producing finer wool than any breed found today.

The synthesis of Andean weaving mastery and decorative ingenuity is captured in the patchwork tunics (unku) of the Wari, who controlled much of what is now western Peru from their capital near modern-day Ayacucho. Between their ascent in the seventh century and their polity’s collapse for unclear reasons around the turn of the millennium, the Wari (also spelled Huari) crafted a range of extraordinary textiles that testified to their society’s material wealth, technological prowess, and high degree of centralization. Like Inca tunics, Wari tapestry-woven unku are so uniform in design and dimension that they were likely produced in government-sponsored workshops, with some unku requiring as many as eighteen miles of exceptionally fine handspun wool; from there, they might have made their way to a high-ranking religious official or have been offered up as a diplomatic present, dazzling viewers the next polity over.

As with all forms of resist dyeing, tie dyeing works by selectively preventing certain areas of cloth from absorbing a coloring agent. For instance, by applying tight bands to a white textile before submerging it in blue dye, then removing the bands and soaking the whole bolt of fabric in cochineal extract, the creator would be left with a pattern of red rings against a purple background. Leave the bands on for both dips and the rings would emerge pure white, untouched by either round of coloring. Stippled and pied with contrasting shades, the finished pieces produced by Wari dyers would have called to mind the skins of forest snakes or the pelts of jaguars — two animals vested with great power in the cosmovisions of pre-Hispanic Andean societies.

With some exceptions, Wari tie-dye unku are not formed of a single bolt of cloth but patched together out of hooks, zigzags, squares, spirals, and stepped blocks — imbuing the garments with symbolic references to regeneration, reciprocity, and the inconnection between worlds. Sometimes, the shapes used are consistent throughout; in other examples, they change tack abruptly, like a melody that refuses easy resolution. Viewers might assume at first glance that these component pieces were cut from larger textiles before being remixed and recombined. But Andean weavers did not cut their cloth, and a close look at the edges of individual pieces reveals something curious: that the patches were not derived from a larger rectangular whole but woven into their irregular shapes from the outset using a complex and labor-intensive technique known as discontinuous warp and weft. The scholar Jane Rehl has used the phrase “technical over-elaboration” with regard to artistic choices like these — the consistent tendency of pre-Columbian weavers to select the most difficult and time-consuming way of executing a given design from amid a range of possibilities of which they were undoubtedly aware. It’s a pattern that invites questions about why such choices were made, even as the technical mastery it demonstrates is beyond question.

Wari textiles such as those presented here comprise some of the most extraordinary examples of Andean fabric art known to us. When worn, these rich tunics would have played against the textures, colors, and sounds made by the wearer’s jewelry, facial adornment, and other garments to create a rich, multisensory impact on all those who passed. But despite their beauty and complexity, Wari textiles have gone under-researched relative to items produced by the later Inca. It’s a matter complicated by shaky provenance information: many Andean textiles entered Global North collections by means of unscrupulous dealers buying from huaqueros, a Latin American term for looters that derives from the Quechua word waka, meaning a sacred site. As a result, it is difficult if not impossible to link many of these pieces to their original archaeological contexts. What’s more, careful scrutiny by experts has revealed that a number of Wari patchwork items have undergone surreptitious recent interventions. Ann Rowe of the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., has documented cases of pieces being cut, cropped, repatched, restitched — even converted from one type of garment into another, as in the case of a tunic that was sewn into a mantle. In the process, argues anthropologist Penelope Dransart, the piece was transformed from a garment intended to be worn on the body to a piece meant to be displayed à la abstract art, and from just one element in a three-dimensional multisensory ensemble to a flat objet d’art suitable for visual consumption in the West.