The stories in this chapter show how women’s exercise of power – not just in political terms, but also in its artistic and spiritual expressions – was etched indelibly on the historical and archaeological record.

From Imperial China in the East to the Andean empires of the West, women of the first millennium negotiated the means to affect their own destiny, and that of the world beyond. Their success is written in some surprising narrative forms – from the trappings of funerals to the ephemeral traces of their tools and crafts. In some cases, their identities are paraded on the grand stage of history. And, if we wish to look for a tangible sense of female authorship in an era when most women’s lives, if noticed at all, were described by celibate men living in segregated communities, then it is to the textiles that we must turn rather than the pages of the chronicles.