On Commensurability: Indigenous Textiles, Precious Metals, and the Making of Colonial Economies in the 16th-Century Andes

The Muisca peoples who lived in the plateaus in the northern Andes (in present-day Colombia) had a rich textile industry best represented by their mantas––square-formed, hand-painted cloths woven out of cotton. Mantas were relevant in both cultural and economic ways. As culturally significant objects, mantas recorded and transmitted information about social hierarchies and the history of muisca communities. They were part of a broader Andean tradition that blended the acts of weaving, knotting, and drawing as forms of “writing without words”, to use Mignolo and Hill Boone’s terms. Mantas were also central to northern Andean economies prior to the Spanish invasion in 1537. After the conquest, mantas became the primary good for colonial tribute and one of the driving forces of the colonial economy under the encomienda system. My paper follows mantas in their movement across its contexts of production, exchange, and consumption, illustrating some of the ways in which they came in and out of indigenous and Spanish spheres in the early imperial world. I argue that the transfer of mantas was crucial in the making of common systems of meaning and exchange between the Muisca and the Spanish in the northern Andes. Because of their peculiar characteristics as Andean and imperial artifacts, mantas served as an unusual platform to enact social relations and economic exchange. Examining the history of mantas as material texts offers a novel view of the hybrid aesthetics, semiotics, and economics of cultural contact in the early Spanish empire.