Paracas mantle 200 A.D. Larco Museum, Lima-Peru, Golden Rectangle

Successive Golden Rectangles dividing a Golden Rectangle into squares (Paracas Mantle, Larco Museum, Lima-Peru).

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The Paracas culture flourished on the southern coast of what is now Peru between 300 BC and AD 300. The Paracas are known for their intricately decorated woven textiles, , found on mummies, which many experts regard as the finest made by any pre-Columbian Andean culture. They used vicuņa wool or cotton; harmonious and with many colors, animal designs, anthropomorphous and geometric, some included feathers.

A golden rectangle is a rectangle whose side lengths are in the golden ratio, one-to-phi, that is, approximately 1:1.618. A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden or Fibonacci spiral.

Fibonacci numbers (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34...) are a sequence of numbers named after Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci. The first number of the sequence is 0, the second number is 1, and each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence itself.

 

 

Paracas Mantle Textile 

 

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Last updated: November 6, 2008