This research investigates textile technologies among the people of the coastal Andean Preceramic Period (10,000 – 3,500 BP) by studying the technological production of bast fibre artefacts from six archaeological sites in Peru and Chile. The raw materials, technological processes and manufacturing techniques were identified through archaeobotanical, structural and morphological analyses to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire of bast fibre production.

By analysing fibre materials from archaeological sites of different ages and locations, this study finds the dominant use of wild-gathered plants in the production of nets and gathering bags, as well as clothing, mats and yarn. Bast fibres from Typha sp. leaves and Schoenoplectus sp. stems were used to make these artefacts, although bast fibres – likely from stems of an unidentified species from Apocynaceae (Asclepias sp.) plant family were used in a few artefacts.. Remains of the ‘epidermis’ of bast fibres in the artefacts indicate decortication as a method of extracting bast fibres from the plants, while the presence of cut marks reveals that sharp tools were used to process the fibres. Splicing was the technique to produce thread and the patterns in manufacturing techniques through techniques such as looping and twining, which remained fairly consistent at the sites found along the Pacific coast. Together, these features suggest a fairly standardised production method for fibre artefacts in the Preceramic Period that enabled me to suggest that bast fibre technologies represent a long-term ‘technological tradition’ among the coastal hunter-gatherers of the Preceramic Period. Furthermore, this research shows that new elements were being added to fibre production, such as camelid hair and various pigments near the end of the Preceramic Period, which coincided with the appearance of more elaborate artefacts.

The function of the fibre artefacts in coastal activities is also crucial for understanding the social dimensions of the marine subsistence strategies that developed during this period. Through this work I discuss how coastal hunter-gatherer groups articulated marine subsistence activities by proposing two alternative theoretical frameworks: ‘Points of Ecological Awareness’ (PEA) and a dance metaphor that are inspired by spatial and ecological dynamics that bast fibre production as a technological system posed.

I use dance to explain the social dynamics of coastal hunter-gatherer groups by establishing the conceptual tools and the analytical lens that I will be using when characterising Preceramic social dynamics, with an emphasis on the chaîne opératoire as collective actions across the Pacific coastal landscape. The concept of ‘PEA’ – a term for the collective of the non-human world of plants, animals, geological and meteorological forces – conveys information about ecological behaviours and actions. These ecological entities grow and change cyclically with the varying climatic conditions of the Pacific coastline throughout the millennia of the Preceramic Period, creating a network of intersubjectivity among the coastal hunter-gatherer groups.

Ultimately, I argue that plant fibre technologies founded the ecological and technological knowledge for advancement of textile production. That, in turn, has enabled me to propose that wild-gathered textile technology offered templates to textile crops, and r to stress that plant-fibre textiles are the first art forms on the Pacific coast, and are undoubtedly predecessors to the long-standing textile tradition in the Andean Region. That also constituted socio-economic and ecological foundations for the shift from wild Typha sp., Schoenoplectus sp. and Apocynaceae plants to cotton (G.Barbadense.). That shift from wild plant to domesticated raw materials impacted the ecology, economy and technology of the early communities of South America’s west coast, raising questions of the critical implications of the Preceramic fibre textile technologies had in our understanding of the social and economic dynamics of early coastal communities of the Peru-Chile area.