Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
Turn the pages with the arrows, keyboard, or a swipe.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SMPK), Published 1996. Paperback, 170 pp.; 28 cm; text in German and English; illustrated with black-and-white catalogue photographs, full-page color plates, and technical weaving diagrams.
In Good condition. Glossy black pictorial paper covers with mild overall scuffing and soiling, light bumping increasing to edges and corners, and a prominent diagonal crease to top corner of rear cover. Binding tight, pages clean and unmarked. The textile collection of the Department of American Archaeology at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin holds roughly 8,500 pre-Columbian textiles from the Andean region. Seventy-two of them share a construction so far known only from this region: discontinuous, reversing warps, in which the warp yarns stop and turn back within the fabric rather than running its full length, so that both warp and weft change color at the pattern boundaries. Strelow catalogues all seventy-two, establishing a typology of the joining methods and reading them against the Berlin collection's partially woven loom, the only complete published example showing how such cloth was produced. Each entry gives the museum catalogue number, findspot, collector and date of acquisition, dimensions, and a full technical analysis: fiber, spin and ply direction, and thread counts per centimeter for every warp and weft, with the warp join keyed to the line diagrams at the back. Objects come from Ancón, Pachacamac, Pisco and Ocoña on the North, Middle and South Coasts, spanning the Middle Horizon to the Late Horizon, roughly 600 to 1532 A.D., many of them collected by Gretzer and by Reiss and Stübel. Photographs by Dietrich Graf, drawings by Renate Sander, English translation by Brigitte Stehlik. Number 61 in the museum's Veröffentlichungen, Neue Folge, and number X in the Abteilung Amerikanische Archäologie series. The German text runs to page 106, followed by the color plates and figures, with the complete English translation at pages 133 to 168 and a bibliography shared by both. Cover shows a detail of a child's tunic, North Coast, Late Intermediate Period, 1000 to 1476 A.D. Contents: Vorwort; Einleitung; Katalog, Vorbemerkungen; Anhang; Farbtafeln (Color Plates); Zeichnungen (Figures); Literaturverzeichnis. English section: Preface; Introduction; Catalogue, Acknowledgements; Appendix; Bibliography.