Cleveland Museum of Art

Mummy Bundle "Mask"

Date

400–200 BCE

Medium

Cotton and pigment; plain weave

Culture

Peru, South Coast, Ica Valley, Ocucaje site, Paracas style (700 BCE–1 CE)

Department

Textiles

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

The Paracas people buried their dead in bundles that they created by carefully wrapping the seated human body in layers of garments and other textiles. In some cases, they placed a painted cloth—such as these examples—on the outer layer and at the top of the bundle. The hair-like yarns (unwoven warps) were arranged around a solid cotton disk that was sometimes wrapped with a headband. The cloths, then, seem to have functioned as the bundle’s head, even though some are painted not with faces but with complete figures whose supernatural character is marked by the appendages streaming from their bodies. These masks fall into two categories, those with only a face and those with a full-bodied figure.

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