The join is a technical feature that indicates standards of craftsmanship. It is customary in weaving materials with end as well as side selvages to give more or less attention to the closing of the space between the weaving proper and the heading strip. When the warps in the form of a skein had been spread out evenly and bound in place to the end bars, the ancient weavers on two-bar looms first wove a shallow heading strip to secure the warps in their positions and to establish the ultimate width of the fabric, a practice followed by some modern weavers today. Then the weaver reversed the loom end for end to begin what became the weaving proper, and continued until the length was complete. Difficulties or indifference to appearance very often resulted in a general looseness of texture where standard-size tools had to be removed and the interlacing done more or less by the fingers. [Plate 2],a, b shows heading strips of different depths, fairly wide join areas in which the wefts are more widely spaced, and above these, the compact texture of the weaving proper.
Three finely woven cloths, one of them shown in [plate 5],d, exemplify warp locking, end-to-end. This technique is known from the earliest periods on the coast in the so-called patchworks from Nazca Valley graves. It occurs also in Middle- and Late-period textiles.[5] The methods of lengthening the warps by the addition of new ones vary, but one feature is common to all those examined: the supplementary transverse yarns are in effect scaffold or skeleton wefts.[6] In the Chincha cloths, the two warps interlock as shown in the reconstruction in [plate 5],a. In two Chincha plain-weave cloths, as in the Nazca patchworks, the warps of two colors meet on the skeleton weft.
Two specimens in lot 4- (3890a and 4056) are poor in quality of craftsmanship. Careless weaving resulted in the breaking of several warps, uneven shedding, and puckering in the center of the web. A three-inch difference in the length between the two side edges of specimen 4-4056 was probably due to slanting of the warping stakes ([fig.6]). There is also a difference between the widths of the ends of each cloth, in one of them as much as three inches. Different weights of yarn are used, their twists ranging from soft-to-medium to crepe.
4-4056
Fig. 6. Diagram of a web showing an irregular shape which may have resulted from careless warping. Occurrences of plain-weave variations are indicated by symbols for units:
, one-by-one;
