Paracas Textile Fragment

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

A history of the world described through individual objects at the British Museum. This week Neil MacGregor, the Museum's Director, is looking at what was happening around the world between 2000-3000 years ago. The theme so far has been one of empires collapsing, new regimes and warfare. In South America there were no new empires and we still don't entirely understand the cultures that were thriving there. In this programme, Neil MacGregor shows off some of the remarkably preserved textiles discovered in the Paracas peninsula on the southern coast of Peru and tries to piece together what life might have been like for these people living in around 500 BC. The early Peruvians went to astonishing lengths to make and decorate their textiles whose colours remain striking to this day. What were they for and what do they tell us about beliefs of this time?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects
0:07.8	from BBC Radio 4. Fashion as we all know, is glamorous and extravagant, frivolous and ephemeral,
0:19.3	but is also a great way to grasp how a society thinks about itself. Looking at clothes is a key part of any serious looking at history. But as we all know to our cost, clothes don't last. They wear out, they fall apart, and what survives gets eaten by the moths.
0:47.2	Compared with stone, pottery or metal, clothes are pretty well non-starters in a history of the world told through things. So regrettably, but perhaps not surprisingly, it's only now well
0:57.8	over a million years into our story that we're coming to clothes and to all that they can tell us about economics and power structures, climate and customs, the living and the dead.
1:10.0	Textiles just have a very unusual place.
1:14.0	It's a constant amazement when we discover these things and find that they're not new and that they were invented years ago.
1:22.0	It's two and a half thousand years. new and that they were invented years ago.
1:23.0	It's two and a half thousand years ago and we're in Peru.
1:28.0	A history of the world in a hundred objects.
1:33.0	Textile fragments.
1:34.0	Textile fragments from the Paracas Peninsula on the southern coast of Peru,
1:47.0	approximately 300 BC.
1:53.0	B.C.
1:59.0	The theme of our week so far has been one of empires collapsing, new regimes and massive bloodshed.
2:06.7	In the South America of 500 BC, there were no empires yet to be overthrown, but as we shall see there certainly was blood. We're learning
2:16.1	new things all the time about the Americas at this date, but compared to what we know
2:20.2	about Asia, much is still relatively mysterious, belonging to a world of
2:24.7	behavior and belief that we still struggle to interpret from fragmentary evidence. I'm in a study room in the British Museum and in front of me are pieces of cloth well over 2,000 years old.
2:44.0	They usually kept in specially controlled conditions,
2:46.2	so I'm not going to leave them all
2:47.9	exposed to ordinary light and humidity for long.
	...

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