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Five millennia ago, early farming societies in the America's selected, domesticated and improved two local species of cotton: Gossypium hirsutum and G. barbadense. The former was cultivated in northern Central America and the Caribbean, the latter -- famous for having the longest, finest fibers of all cottons -- in western South America. When the Spaniards crossed the Peruvian desert in 1531 they marveled at the extensive fields of cotton growing in a range of colors unlike anything they had seen in the Old World. Naturally colored cotton fabrics were among the first items collected as tribute and sold or shipped to the Spanish court. Those Indian textiles were more technically sophisticated than anything woven on European looms at the end of the 15th century. Highly prized by the Europeans, these long stapled cotton plants of Central and South America, were transported around the world to become the progenitors of what today are considered to be the world's premier cottons. Over two decades of ethnographic, botanical and archaeological research by the Native Cotton Project of Peru, has led to the identification of pre-Columbian farming techniques for sustained cotton harvesting and environmental resource management, the reintroduction of of traditional water management systems, quality seed selection and biological pest control methods. |
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