Textiles and basketry

A Navajo weaving, a Pima basket, a beaded hide bag and a Peruvian textile fragment share three enemies: clothes moth and carpet beetle, which eat protein fibres (wool, hair, hide, feather); light, which fades every dye and embrittles every fibre; and folds, which break fibres along the crease. Store flat or rolled on an acid-free tube, interleaved with tissue, in the dark, at a steady 45–55 % relative humidity, and inspect every quarter for frass, webbing and cast larval skins.

Treat an infestation by freezing, not spraying: bag the piece, freeze at −20 °C for a week, thaw slowly in the bag, repeat. Mothballs and insecticides leave residues and do not reach the eggs. Quarantine every new arrival the same way before it goes in with the collection. Do not wash; dyes run, and a wet-cleaned rug loses the surface a buyer reads for age.

Age and maker are the disclosure questions. Aniline dyes date a Navajo weaving after the 1880s, Germantown yarns to a particular window, and a synthetic warp to the twentieth century; a nineteenth-century attribution on a piece with a synthetic warp is wrong. Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act a weaving may be called “Navajo” only if a Navajo weaver made it; “Navajo-style” is the honest label for trade pieces and Mexican reproductions, and Stratum's gate looks for the word when the title names a tribe.

Basketry is the same chemistry with plant fibres: keep it dry but not desiccated (dry grass shatters), support the shape with a tissue form, never hang by the rim. Record every repair — re-stitched rims, replaced coils, re-sewn beads — on the Preparation card; an “as found” basket and a restored one are different lots.