Where does Chullo (knitted hat with earflaps) come from?
The chullo comes from the Andes of Peru and Bolivia. This knitted hat with earflaps, made from alpaca, llama, vicuña or sheep's wool, keeps out the cold of the high mountains, and its patterns can tell people where its wearer comes from.
A hat for the high Andes
Ch'ullu is a Quechua word; in Aymara the hat is called lluch'u, and Spanish made it chullo. It is knitted in the round from fibres such as alpaca, llama and vicuña, traditionally on five double-pointed needles, and its earflaps can be tied under the chin. Bands of colour or designs of local animals run around it, and in the Bolivian Andes these can show the wearer's origin, age, and social and marital status.
Andean hands, a new technique
Knitting was unknown in the Andes before the Spanish conquest of 1532. It arrived with the colonists, and Andean people adopted and adapted it; excavations at the colonial town of Magdalena de Cao Viejo, on Peru's north coast, have found what may be the earliest surviving knitting in the Americas. Where the hat's shape came from is debated: some point to Moche pottery figures of around 600 AD wearing pointed headwear with earflaps, others to caps worn by 16th-century Spaniards.
Why people say Nepal
Similar earflap hats are associated with the Himalayas, so Nepal is an easy guess. But the chullo belongs to the Andes. On Taquile, an island in Lake Titicaca on the Peruvian side, textiles are made every day by men and women of all ages, and the chullo is one of the most characteristic garments. UNESCO proclaimed Taquile and its textile art part of humanity's intangible heritage in 2005, inscribing it on its Representative List in 2008.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · ich.unesco.org ↗ · digitalcommons.unl.edu ↗ · selvedge.org ↗
