[cheerful percussion with bird sound effects evoking period and mood]
Male Narrator: Imagine how many tens of thousands of glossy macaw feathers it took to create just one of these immense, brightly colored panels. They are among 96 such works found in southern Peru, where the Wari culture flourished about 1400 years ago. The Wari went to great lengths to obtain the highly prized feathers—or perhaps the living birds—from the macaw’s natural habitat in the Amazon rainforest. This was more than a thousand miles away, on the other side of the Andes. Timothy Potts:
[music ends]
Timothy Potts: They’ve been intricately made by tying each of the individual feathers—they’re hand-knotted onto cotton strings, and then stitched onto plain-weave cotton panels, making these very bold yellow-and-blue checkerboard patterns.
Male Narrator: The panels were found rolled up inside large ceramic jars buried in the ground, and they survived in such pristine condition because the climate in coastal Peru is exceptionally dry. Their dimensions suggest they were displayed on the walls of a great building or monument. [mysterious, rhythmic music evoking period and mood] The Wari had no written language, so the full meaning of the featherworks remains elusive.
Timothy Potts: I think they appeal to people partly because they have this intriguing, exotic quality. And yet they resonate so much also to those with an interest in contemporary art. Looking at them today, they look so modern. It’s hard not to compare them to hard-edged abstract paintings of the twentieth and even twenty-first century.
[music ends]
