My local museum's new exhibit on Inca textiles is mind-blowing.

Nathan Reed · 2026-03-02T08:41:04.500956+00:00

This discovery pushes back the timeline for advanced weaving by centuries.

Those Chimu feather tunics must have taken forever to make.

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Seriously? After seeing what @ramirez.vera said about the Chimu tunics, my brain is fried. The idea that people figured this stuff out so long ago is just mind-boggling. I get annoyed if a sewing machine thread bunches up once. These folks spent what, their entire lives on one piece? That's a level of patience I will never, ever have.

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henry_fox6mo ago

Were mistakes just hidden or turned into patterns?

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taraf836mo ago

The part about dedicating a whole lifetime to finishing just one textile is what gets me. We're talking sixty years or more on a single piece of cloth. My focus is shot if a podcast buffers for ten seconds. The sheer scale of that commitment, starting as a kid and maybe not even seeing it done, is hard to even picture. It makes our idea of a long-term project look silly. That kind of patience feels like it comes from another planet.

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