The Peruvian weaver's bones - and the fibers and fabrics attached to her - can tell us about when and where she lived, and what she did for a living.

For over a hundred years, the body of a now anonymous woman rested undisturbed and unstudied in Cornell's McGraw Hall. This short delicate woman lived somewhere on the arid North-Central coast of what is now Peru at the end of the 14th century, during the ascendancy of the Chimu state. Her people thrived in this seemingly desolate environment through intensive exploitation of the sea, extensive irrigation-based agriculture, and trade with the Andean highlands and the Amazon forest. When she developed the tooth infection that probably killed her in her late 30’s, the Inca were still confined to the Central Highlands and the Spanish were a continent and a culture away.

Her anonymity was guaranteed by the fact that she was one of thousands of burials from a culture with elaborate burial practices, but no way that we now recognize to record her name - her people used no obvious writing system for memorializing even the barest facts of life and death,

Even if her wrappings and her bones cannot tell us her name, or who her parents or children were, and even less about her feelings and beliefs, they still can tell us a great deal.

Here's what we learned about her from her remains:

• She was female.
• She was about 4 feet 11 inches tall.
• Her bones are worn in the ways you would expect if she had spent her life spinning thread and weaving wth a backstrap loom.
• She was probably in her late thirties when she died.
• She died and was buried between 1370 and 1450AD.
• She was tied up and buried in the fetal position typical of pre-Columbian Peruvian burials.

These bare facts help us to give her a home and an era, and help us to imagine what her life, and her death and burial, might have been like.

Weaving and textiles in pre-Columbian Peru:

From the wear on her bones, we have concluded that she was probably a weaver, one of the most important activities in pre-Columbian Peru. Andean societies of the time did not have writing as we know it. Instead, textiles served as sacred texts and state propaganda by transmitting concepts of both divine and imperial prestige, while knotted strings, quipu, provided the means for keeping accounts, both historical and financial.

Although both men and women were involved in the day-to-day production of houshold textiles, women were the principle producers of high-quality goods used for ceremonial wear.

Weaving was performed on backstrap looms, and more infrequently on vertical looms. For backstrap looms, the weaver sits on the ground, with a strap around her back to keep the loom stretched between her and a post or posts placed at some distance in front of her. This position causes wear and tear on the parts of the pelvis - the ischial tuberosities - that touch the hard ground; and also on the back, because of the stress on the spine caused by the curve needed to keep the strap in place while leaning over to weave.

This contemporary Guatemalan women is using a backstrap loom. Note the curvature of her back. Source: http://www.guatravellers.com/backstrap_loom.jpg

In addition to her back changes, our Peruvian Weaver has changes in the fingers of her right hand which suggest that she had been spinning to create the yarn that she later wove into fabric.