Editing Inca Empire (section)

=== Tunics ===
[[File:Tupa-inca-tunic.png|thumb|left|Tunic worn by an Inca of high rank, in vicuña wool and cotton (1450–1540), kept at the Washington [[Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection]]<ref>{{cite web |url=http://museum.doaks.org/objects-1/info/23071 |title=All T'oqapu Tunic |website=[[Dumbarton Oaks|Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection]]}}</ref>]]

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.<ref name=":4">Karen B. Graubart (2000), "Weaving and the Construction of a Gender Division of Labor in Early Colonial Peru", ''The American Indian Quarterly'', 24, no. 4, pp. 537–561.</ref>

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.<ref>Mills, Kenneth; Taylor, William B.; and Graham, Sandra Lauderdale, eds. ''Colonial Latin America - A Documentary History'', Denver, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, pp. 14–18.</ref>

==== Uncu ====
[[Uncu (tunic)|Uncu]] was a men's garment similar to a tunic. It was an upper-body garment of knee-length; Royals wore it with a mantle cloth called ''[[Yacolla (garment)|yacolla]]''.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Cummins |first1=Thomas B. F. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nrpDAgAAQBAJ&dq=uncu&pg=PA127 |title=The Getty Murua: Essays on the Making of Martin de Murua's "Historia General del Piru", J. Paul Getty Museum Ms. Ludwig XIII 16 |last2=Anderson |first2=Barbara |date=23 September 2008 |publisher=[[Getty Research Institute|Getty Publications]] |isbn=978-0-89236-894-5 |page=127 |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Feltham |first=Jane |url=http://archive.org/details/peruviantextiles0000felt |title=Peruvian textiles |date=1989 |publisher=[[Aylesbury]] |isbn=978-0-7478-0014-9 |page=57}}</ref>