Reading ancient textiles

Irene Good is an expert in ancient textiles, a specialist who examines cloth that is ages-old to find out facts about the people who made it. Good has a one-year appointment as the Hrdy Visiting Curator in Anthropology at Harvard. Good's painstaking analysis of artifacts -- such as the nearly 5,000 ancient Peruvian textile pieces contained in Harvard's Peabody Museum -- will provide important data about the Incan civilization from which they came. Just as pottery fragments provide archaeologists with evidence by which to date events or chart the movements of people or the flow of goods and ideas, textiles furnish their own set of clues, which shed light on such things as agriculture, animal husbandry, trade, and technology. The difference, of course, is that ceramics are far more durable, but specialists like Good have devised ways of gleaning valuable data from textile fragments that were once thought hopeless. In her work with the Peabody's Peruvian collection, Good hopes to make new discoveries, which will perhaps lead to new insights about the interaction of the highland and lowland peoples of the pre-Columbian Andean world.