Hot 'n' Cold: Day 2 in Cusco

It is our second day in Cusco and we started it off right by staying in the hotel until one in the afternoon. After grabbing some lunch from the vegetarian restaurant, we headed off to our first destination, which was a textile museum and part of the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco. While it was an extremely small museum, it nevertheless gave me much insight into the way of life of the people of Cusco. I learned that children of this region and culture, from a very early age, begin to learn the art of weaving textiles. The textiles that the museum displayed ranged from textiles woven by young children as part of their first weavings to professional shawls and ponchos woven by elderly experts at the part. The purpose of this, I think, is to show the chronological progression of talent and skill that these people develop over time regarding weaving. Out in the shop area of the museum were a few locals weaving to show us firsthand what was going on, which was quite fascinating.

Probably the most interesting thing that I learned about this art of textile weaving is the role of symmetry in the designs. The significance of symmetry seems to be the opposite of what we'd seen up until now. Specifically, when looking at something such as pottery, one should pay special attention to the symmetry of the designs because it could mean something significant. However, the opposite may be true for these handwoven textiles because there is a sort of "natural symmetry" to the patterns. For example, as can be seen in the picture above, the weaver's hands are doing the exact same thing, just reflected, creating reflectional symmetry on the textile. So in the case of textiles, it could be that the significance comes when there is not any symmetry.

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Our next stop was to the Cusco Regional History Museum. This museum had a lot more to offer in terms of volume. Pictures were actually allowed in this museum so I have plenty to put in this part of the blog entry. Much of the museum was dedicated to Túpac Amaru, the last indigenous monarch of the Inca state in Peru. He was eventually executed by the Spanish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Amaru.

Naturally, as the Spanish took control of Peru, they brought forth their Christian theology, which greatly influenced the artwork of Cusco.