Paracas culture

The Paracas flourished between about 800 and 100 BCE on Peru's south-central coast, in the Ica region, masters of water and thread in the desert. From the great seaside cemetery of the Paracas Peninsula, excavated by Julio Tello in the 1920s, come shaft tombs of Cerro Colorado reused over centuries, bundle burials wrapped in embroideries of staggering complexity: flying shamans, double-headed snakes and trophy heads worked in hundreds of colours and stitches. Paracas surgeons practised trephination, opening skulls with obsidian and gold plates; elongated crania bound in infancy marked elite heads. Incised polychrome and negative-resist ceramics carried the same iconography as the cloth. The Wari Kayan necropolis, hundreds of burials packed inside abandoned buildings, shows a society that honoured its dead above all. Around 100 BCE the Paracas world transformed into the Nazca tradition, which inherited its textiles, its aqueducts and its desert gods. Julio Tello's 1920s excavations made Paracas embroidery the pride of Peruvian archaeology.