The color in the Nasca civilization: dye production and pictorial.

Summary This thesis proposes to study in depth the dyeing materials and the techniques of dyeing applied to the textiles of the Nasca culture. This pre-Hispanic civilization, without writing, developed on the southern coast of Peru for about nine centuries (200 BC to 700 AD). Among its material culture, textiles are abundant and many of them are of great finesse with polychrome decorations. The polychromy probably had a meaning in the Nasca cosmogony and the textile is particularly loaded with meaning in the Andean culture. However, the materials of the color remain a subject still unknown in the textile field. It seemed therefore interesting to identify by means of physical-chemical methods the coloring materials used by Nasca textile artists. To do this, a field survey was conducted upstream to collect and identify the coloring sources likely to have been used. Then a textile corpus was constituted with unpublished textiles, resulting from recent excavations carried out on the sites of Los Molinos, Estaqueria and Cahuachi, the ancient political-ceremonial center of Nasca. Some fabrics from other cultures (Topará, Mochica and Nasca drivé) have also been analyzed to establish comparisons. The results provide valuable information that characterizes the dyeing and painting production of Nasca textiles. Beyond this technical aspect, these data are useful to approach from another angle more complex archaeological problems, especially when the cultural attribution of textiles is unknown or discussed, such as those of the Paracas peninsula.