Pizarro's conquest of Peru in 1532 and his subsequent introduction of the Catholic Church obliterated Incan civilisation. One great loss was textile traditions that had been evolving for millennia during the rise and fall of numerous cultures. Fortunately for textile historians, the region's prehistoric peoples left thousands of mummies buried in the desert, some of them wrapped in more than a hundred pieces of cloth. These mummy bundles show that pre-Columbian Peruvians had mastered all the textile technologies known to preindustrial Europe, as well as others unknown there, such as...