Recently, there has been a development that allows my colourful youth to be recaptured. My people used natural dyes made of plants, minerals, and even insects to colour the fibres in their textiles. Over the centuries, as textiles like me age, our colours fade and change. As you can see, my red, yellow, black and purple dyed threads have fared pretty well over time, although some parts of me are more faded than others. I used to have a great deal more blue thread woven into me, but for some reason, the dyes or mordants used to colour my blue threads caused more degradation than those used to make other colours.

However, now that a picture of me can be scanned into a computer, it is possible to restore much of my colour and brilliance to a level consistent with my best preserved sections. Now you can see that the Moche, like other coastal Andean people, preferred bright colours with high contrasts on their textiles!