Dance belt

674-3, 6°Kachina dance sash (in two halves); ta-kun-i-kwi-kya-tsi-napa, or kâkâthléom (TK); cotton, wool, pigments; l. 102 cm. (without fringe), w. 26.5 cm.; ca. 1880.‖ The oldest known kachina dance sashes were collected among the Hopis in the 1870s by John Wesley Powell and Colonel James Stevenson (Stevenson 1883:fig. 501; Sayers 1981:71; cf. Hedlund and Dittemore 2004:61, fig. 2 ). Although the Hopis also traded these with their sedentary neighbors and even the Navajos as Ten Kate noted, very similar sashes were woven at Zuni and in many New Mexican Pueblo villages, as the fieldwork of Douglas has documented (Douglas 1938, 1939, 1939a, 1940; Mera 1943; Kent 1983:76-79). When Stevenson was collecting in Zuni in 1879 for the Smithsonian Institution, he acquired a whole series of kachina dance sashes of either Hopi or Zuni manufacture (Stevenson 1883:373-374, figs. 500-502). As parts of ritual dress, the kachina sashes were standardized to a great extent, and show only few variations. Because virtually all kachina sashes that have been published are identified as Hopi, and for their interpretation we rely heavily on fieldwork done at the Hopi villages.The warp of the upright loom i