Kyle Marini is a Barra Dissertation Fellow in Art and Material Culture and a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Penn State University. His dissertation concerns the production and ritual use of textiles by the Inca empire. It pivots on an enormous rope sculpture that was annually processed in the foremost Inca solstice ritual and served as the imperial portrait of an Inca emperor. He is developing an interdisciplinary methodology to recover the destroyed rope's construction, appearance, and visual impact across media to illuminate Inca modes of artistic representation.
Q: How did you become interested in your dissertation topic?
Marini: For my master's thesis, I read through all of the chronicles about the Incas in search of a textile-related topic and came across accounts of a massive, 900-foot rope that has not been commensurately emphasized in scholarly literature, likely because it was destroyed. This got me interested in this object and inspired me to undertake interdisciplinary training in Quechua linguistics, radiocarbon dating, and laser detection and ranging (lidar) to piece together disparate evidence of comparable ropes in museum collections and ethnohistoric sources that relate other media that the rope visually influenced. In unison, these methods help me to conceive of the larger rope's period viewership to recover its cultural importance and dissemination throughout the Andes.
Q: What is something you’ve read or watched recently that other early Americanists might find interesting?
Marini: I have an exciting new database to advertise that an ambitious undergraduate at Penn State, Evan Paulson, just completed and shared with me. It is called the "WHIRL Archive" (Western Hemisphere Indigenous Reference Library), and it contains high-resolution images (minding the cultural sensitivity of their reproduction) of major Indigenous textual and pictographic sources in North, Central, and South America.
Q: If you could see or visit any historical artifact or site, what would it be and why?
Marini: I wish it were possible to experience the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan before it was deconstructed to build Mexico City. Last summer I traveled to Mexico City for the first time and also had the chance to visit Tenochtitlan, just an hour or so away. I was so impressed by the sprawling expanse of the site, and I couldn't imagine how marvelous the Mexica city looked before the lake of Texcoco it was built on was drained. The impact on the ecosystem is evident, and the fact that I was bitten continually by mosquitoes at such high altitudes also attests to the city's invisible past.
Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the field of early American studies?
Marini: I think the integration of traditionally separate fields and disciplines is a challenge that early American studies is now responding to. Since the “early Americas” can encompass essentially the entire Western hemisphere (if it is so perceived), many fields circumscribed to certain geographies due to the colonization of European powers in that region are acquiring much more porous boundaries. For example, the field of “Latin America” is often conceived to encompass territories south of the modern U.S.-Mexico border, which overlooks former Spanish colonies in the present-day United States. However, some exciting publications in recent years have started to emphasize these areas’ importance to early American history. A recent book that accomplishes this which I enjoyed is Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023).
Q: What are you most enjoying about your Fellowship at the McNeil Center?
Marini: I have really enjoyed closely analyzing the structures of almost 100 Andean textiles at the Penn Museum. I am combing through all of the Andean braids in the collection, which comprise elements of vegetal and camelid fiber slingshots, bags, and beyond. The museum staff have been very welcoming and supportive of my research, and they are facilitating my application to request destructive fiber samples for radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis, which I will conduct at Penn State's Radiocarbon Laboratory, if approved. The Penn Museum's collection is so special because it maintains the findspot context for the majority of their Andean textile collection. Their study is invaluable to illuminate Andean textiles in collections around the world which do not retain this critical information.
Kyle Marini is a Barra Dissertation Fellow in Art and Material Culture at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Read more about his dissertation on his bio page.