section_path: Culture/Tunics
section_name: Tunics
paragraph_text: Tunics
  
  Tunics were created by skilled Inca textile-makers as a piece of warm clothing, but they also symbolized cultural and political status and power. Cumbi was the fine, tapestry-woven woolen cloth that was produced and necessary for the creation of tunics. Cumbi was produced by specially-appointed women and men. Generally, textile-making was practiced by both men and women. As emphasized by certain historians, only with European conquest was it deemed that women would become the primary weavers in society, as opposed to Inca society where specialty textiles were produced by men and women equally.
  
  Complex patterns and designs were meant to convey information about order in Andean society as well as the Universe. Tunics could also symbolize one's relationship to ancient rulers or important ancestors. These textiles were frequently designed to represent the physical order of a society, for example, the flow of tribute within an empire. Many tunics have a "checkerboard effect" which is known as the collcapata. According to historians Kenneth Mills, William B. Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, the collcapata patterns "seem to have expressed concepts of commonality, and, ultimately, unity of all ranks of people, representing a careful kind of foundation upon which the structure of Inkaic universalism was built." Rulers wore various tunics throughout the year, switching them out for different occasions and feasts.
  
  The symbols present within the tunics suggest the importance of "pictographic expression" within Inca and other Andean societies far before the iconographies of the Spanish Christians.