In the spring of 1994 a conservator at the Textile Museum in Lima laid a fragment of Wari tapestry on the inspection table and asked me to count the weft passes per centimetre. I lost count somewhere past two hundred. The fragment was the corner of an unku, a square-cut tunic woven between roughly 600 and 1000 of the common era in the Ayacucho basin, and it had been folded against itself for so long that the staff-god face along its seam had printed, faintly, onto the band beneath it — a ghost of a god laid over a god.

The figure is not repeating because the weaver was lazy. It is repeating because the empire needed to be read at a glance, from across a plaza, on a moving body. — On the function of the staff-god in Wari statecraft

I. A garment cut from a mountain

An unku is not sewn from a pattern piece. It is woven, on a backstrap loom, as two identical panels that are joined at the centre seam and folded at the shoulders, leaving an opening for the head. The whole garment is therefore a single continuous textile logic: the columns on the front continue, unbroken, across the seam. I learned this the slow way one winter in Cusco, trying to draft a paper pattern from a published diagram and finding that the columns refused to line up. They were never meant to be cut.