Tocapu, Pattern as Language

On the finest Inca tunics the cloth is covered in small squares, each holding a geometric figure, and no two rows repeat. These are tocapu. Whether they were a script, a heraldry or a record is still argued. What is not argued is that in the Andes pattern was never decoration. It said something. We try to keep that in mind before we cut.

The squares

A tocapu is a square, a hand's width or less, filled with a figure: a stepped diamond, a zigzag, a checkerboard, a cross, a key. On a royal tunic there can be hundreds, arranged in rows, and the sequence is deliberate. The most famous surviving example, a tunic now in Washington, carries more than three hundred and almost none of them are the same. Weaving one took a specialist, and the finest were made only for the ruler.

Was it writing?

Nobody knows for certain. Some scholars read tocapu as a system of signs with fixed meanings, a kind of writing in cloth that the Inca used alongside the knotted-string khipu. Others read them as emblems of lineage, province or office, closer to heraldry. What both readings agree on is that the figures were not chosen for looks. They meant, and the people who could read them knew what they meant.

Pattern in aguayo today

Tocapu belonged to the royal cloth, not the everyday. But the same idea runs through aguayo now: the stripe order names a community, the figured bands are a weaver's signature, and a pattern can tell someone from the next valley where you are from. That is the cloth we cut. It is already speaking before we touch it.

Cut with respect

This is why we do not redraw the pattern, simplify it, or print an imitation onto plain fabric. We recut real cloth and say where it comes from. Read what we stand on, see the weave families, and look at the diamond weave on the Urubamba, the closest thing we make to a tocapu.