Ancient Modernisms: Illegibility, Women, and 1950s Weaving

This chapter considers the networks surrounding pre-Andean archaeology and art history in mid-twentieth-century New York, and in particular, the role of women artists and female assistants—specifically, the weavers Anni Albers and Sheila Hicks as crucial, but uncredited, interlocutors for their more famous male colleagues, Junius Bouton Bird and George Kubler in adjacent fields of Mesoamerican archaeology and art history. This chapter addresses the discourse around studying ancient textile samples recovered from Huaca Prieta on the south coast of Peru, the site Bird excavated beginning in 1946, and examines the problem of weaving as a gendered language in which women retained a specialized fluency, given the history of the textile as a category of “women's work.”