Hats, moustaches and knitting

Sunday 12th September – Leymebamba
As I sat outside the market square cafe where I had just had breakfast ... waiting for my 8am bus to Cajarmarca (9 hours ... more anon), I get to thinking about what distinguishes Peru – at least visually –from the other countries I have visited this year. And one very noticeable thing is the hats. There seem to be different styles in different areas – the most noticeable are those worn with the different local costumes by the really local people. However, even in the cities men and women are into hats. Susan, my sister in law, succumbed to buying (and wearing) a very fetching black hat with red embroidery all over it. I wonder what wedding that will be worn to?

Here in the northern highlands they wear the most remarkable straw sombreros ... worthy of the most outrageous cowboy film - very high and often with enormous brims. You see them on both men and women .. though they seem to have slightly different styles. I suspect that the older and more respectable you get, the bigger you buy your next hat ... at least that is what I deduce.

I look across the square and as usual there are bunch of men chatting and they sport a variety .. a baseball hat, a homburg and then the magnificent sombrero – only young men and women go without.
This hat thing is most noticeable here because I am in the countryside and it is obvious that this straw sombrero is ‘country’ headwear – not something you wear in town unless you have come into town to sell your wares in the market or on the street. It will mark you out as coming from farming stock no doubt.

So, as I sat on the bus . winding its way through the mountains this hat appeared walking beside a couple of cows, sitting by the doorway of a hut, walking along a pathway.... and when finally we stopped for lunch an elderly couple with lots of produce for market got on ... with their hats! They were bound for Celendin ... what seemed to be the epicentre of straw hat wearing.

As we drew in to town at about 2.30pm and the bus driver said we had a half hour break, I decided to try and find a shop where they were being sold. I was directed to a shop just off the market and had a sweet, if hurried 5 minutes, trying them all on. I didn’t dare buy one of the most outrageous ones (when would I wear it and how would I get it back?) but I returned to the bus a happy bunny and the other passengers inspected it carefully to determined if it was of good quality.... it appeared to pass muster. They are made to the same fine mesh as a panama but bigger.

So what about the other hats .... well there are ones like upside down soup plates with tassles hanging from them. There are others that look like wedding cakes ... they are a delight and I have only managed to ‘capture’ a few without being to intrusive on the wearers.

So to moustaches.... well there were a lot of them in Argentina and Chile ...it seemed to be the norm for anyone over 30 and very smart they were too. It is funny how unusual they are in UK (Dave Munson sports the only one I see around Brill). Here in Peru they still feature but not nearly so much. And one possible reason may be that with a higher number of people with indigenous genes in them... they may not have as much facial hair. When I went on a tour of the tomb of Sipan, the young guide there was at pains to help us imagine what life was like then and one of the things he mentioned is that there was little evidence of much facial hair in the images on ceramics and also on the skin of those bodies of the mummies found. And he then said that this was the same now: that those people who come from more indigenous origins usually have less body hair. I presume he knew what he was talking about ...intriguing.

And ....knitting. Well, I haven’t seen a lot of this going on but in my travels I have always noted that as you go around less wealthy or remoter communities ... you will sooner or later find ladies knitting. I say ladies because it is nearly always women who do this ... but we found on the Island of Tequile Island on Lake Titicaca it was the men’s job! Groups of them stood in the shade and clicked away making quite fine hats and scarves). In several countries in Africa I have been to you often see people standing by the road knitting ... chatting, waiting for a bus ...or whatever. And in parts of South East Asia too. I suspect if it weren’t so cold and wet you might see this on the Scottish Islands too!
Here in Peru I have more often seen ladies walking along with a roll of carded wool under one arm and a spindle hanging from the other .... spinning yarn as she walks along. My belief is that this is all destined for weaving .... I wonder whether all of it is for the tourist industry ... I suspect so. I have also noticed quite a number of shops and stalls in marketplaces with loads of brightly coloured wools ... but on closer inspection these are all synthetic... so clearly there is quite a bit of knitting going on but I think most of it is being done in the dimly lit shops in town ... while they wait patiently for customers or by grannies sitting on the doorsteps of houses in the countryside.
So, why does one never see any evidence of knitting among the textiles one sees in museums? When was knitting invented? Is it a modern thing? Or does it come unravelled and disintegrate and therefore is not found in tombs and other archaeological sites? I suppose fishing nets are the nearest one gets to knitting? Why did this not transfer to clothing – when it is now seen as such a useful way of creating warm clothing? Having visited the precolombian and Inka museums in Cusco and the museum in Ica which had some beautiful woven cloth dating from the Nascan period (Dates 100-750 AD) .. and then in the North of Peru seeing the magnificent artifacts of gold, shells, ceramic that came out of the Moche, Chimu and Lamayeque tombs... one wonders whether they also did have knitted products but that they just didn’t survive.
Well we are pretty sure that the precolumbians and Incas didn’t have moustaches, they definitely would have had hats. They didn’t have the wheel, any animal that they could ride on (the horse arrived with the Spanish) or any form of sophisticated writing (only systems of strings and knots which possibly served as calendars or accounting system) .... so what about knitting? Did they or didn’t they have that before those Spanish ladies arrived? This brings me back to hats .... the classic hat that every tourist buys to take home is the knitted hats with earflaps with tassles hanging from them. When did that become the classic hat associated with the Andes ... and in particular in Peru?