Margaret Young-Sanchez is Chief Curator and Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of pre-Columbian Art at the Denver Art Museum. She curated the collections of pre-Columbian, African, Oceanic, and American Indian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art for ten years, before moving to Denver in 1999. Dr. Young-S nchez earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in anthropology at Yale University and a doctorate in art history at Columbia University. Her exhibition "Tiwanaku: Ancestors of the Inca" opened in Denver in 2004.

The Frederick and Jan Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum sponsors annual symposia in these two fields of art. This volume presents essays on Andean textiles from the 2001 symposium. Color reproductions of many of these works illustrate the essays, which include:
• Weaving Principles for Life: Discontinuous Warp and Weft Textiles of Ancient Peru by Jane W. Rehl, Savannah College of Art and Design
• Class, Control, and Power: The Anthropology of Textile Dyes at Pacatnamu by Ran Boytner, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA
• Four-Part Head Cloths from the Peruvian Central Coast by Margaret Young-Sánchez, Denver Art Museum
• Cosmology in Inca Tunics and Tectonics by Marianne Hogue, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Inka Colonial Tunics: A Case Study of the Bandelier Set by Joanne Pillsbury, Dumbarton Oaks
• Contemporary Andean Textiles as Cultural Communication by Andrea M. Heckman, University of New Mexico