This rare skirt panel fragment comes from the burial site Shanpula, a small oasis town in the Tarim Basin, found in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on the Southern Silk Road. Despite not being an elite burial, Shanpula is considered one of the most important archaeological burial sites for its wealth of textile goods including woolens. Four excavations conducted by the Xinjiang Museum and Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology between 1983 and 1996 offer insight into the cultural diversity that prevailed in the region before the arrival of Buddhism around 300 ce, alluding to a complex cultural mixture of distant Iranian artistic elements that is evidence for long-distance contact with dynastic China (Bunker 2001, 16).

Originally part of a woman’s ankle-length woolen skirt, the fragment consists of plain red and blue horizontal stripes and a tapestry-woven band edged with a wide, braided flounce. Marching left to right within the tapestry band is a procession of stylized deerlike animals, their heads lowered, with huge, voluted antlers extending nearly the full height of the band— a counterbalance to the flanks and tail (Mott 2004–2005, 20). The deer are of two alternating types, one winged, with a raptor’s head rising from its back, the other with a curvilinear element suggesting a vestigial wing or flame. While the heritage of the Shanpula dwellers is uncertain, the mythological iconography and stylistic rendering of interlocked reciprocal forms relate to the art of the Saka, nomadic Iranian people who inhabited the Eurasian steppe. jkd