Stringing together the history of an ancient Incan textile

Kyle Marini is a Barra Dissertation Fellow in Art and Material Culture at at The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at Penn's School of Arts & Sciences, and a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Penn State University. His dissertation concerns the production and ritual use of textiles by the Inca empire. It pivots on an enormous rope sculpture that was annually processed in the foremost Inca solstice ritual and served as the imperial portrait of an Inca emperor. He is developing an interdisciplinary methodology to recover the destroyed rope's construction, appearance, and visual impact across media to illuminate Inca modes of artistic representation.

"For my master's thesis, I read through all of the chronicles about the Incas in search of a textile-related topic and came across accounts of a massive, 900-foot rope that has not been commensurately emphasized in scholarly literature, likely because it was destroyed," says Marini. "This got me interested in this object and inspired me to undertake interdisciplinary training in Quechua linguistics, radiocarbon dating, and laser detection and ranging (lidar) to piece together disparate evidence of comparable ropes in museum collections and ethnohistoric sources that relate other media that the rope visually influenced. In unison, these methods help me to conceive of the larger rope's period viewership to recover its cultural importance and dissemination throughout the Andes."

Marini highlights the the biggest challenges facing the field of early American studies. "I think the integration of traditionally separate fields and disciplines is a challenge that early American studies is now responding to," he says. "Since the 'early Americas' can encompass essentially the entire Western hemisphere (if it is so perceived), many fields circumscribed to certain geographies due to the colonization of European powers in that region are acquiring much more porous boundaries."

Read more at The McNeil Center for Early American Studies.