I used to think ancient pottery was just, you know, old bowls.
Then I spent an afternoon in a museum storage room in Lima, turning over fragments of Wari ceramics—pieces from roughly 600 to 1000 CE, give or take a few decades—and something clicked. The designs weren’t just decoration. They were arguments, encoded in slip paint and geometric precision, about how to organize visual space. The Wari Empire, which dominated much of Peru before the Inca, left behind thousands of vessels covered in patterns so rhythmically complex that contemporary surface designers still can’t quite replicate their balance of chaos and control. Turns out, the potters working in places like Conchopata weren’t just making functional objects; they were solving problems that digital pattern designers wrestle with today: how do you create movement without disorientation, repetition without boredom, density without visual collapse?
The Geometry That Refuses to Sit Still
Wari ceramics employ what archaeologists call “interlocking step-fret” motifs—angular spirals that nest inside each other like obsessive origami. I’ve seen modern textile designers try to recreate this effect in Adobe Illustrator and fail, repeatedly, because the ancient versions have this weird quality: they look machine-made but feel hand-drawn. The symmetry is there, mostly, but with enough micro-variations that your eye never settles. One designer I spoke with in Brooklyn said it felt like “chasing a pattern that’s always half a step ahead of you.”
Wait—maybe that’s the point. The Wari weren’t working from grids or digital templates; they were improvising within strict rules, like jazz musicians with a very specific chord progression. The result is patterns that breathe.
Color Blocking Before Mondrian Thought He Invented It
Here’s the thing: Wari potters used maybe four or five colors—cream, red-orange, black, sometimes a grayish purple—but they organized them with a sophistication that makes modern color theory look simplistic.
They’d divide a vessel’s surface into bands, then subdivide those bands asymmetrically, then fill each section with patterns that related to but didn’t quite match their neighbors. It’s not harmony, exactly. It’s more like controlled tension, the kind you see in Bauhaus posters or mid-century Scandinavian textiles, except this predates all of that by a thousand years. A wallpaper designer in London told me she keeps Wari vessel photos pinned above her desk because “they remind me that complexity doesn’t require more colors—it requires better relationships between the ones you have.” She’s been trying to capture that quality in a collection for three years now.
Why Contemporary Designers Keep Coming Back to Conchopata
Honestly, I think it’s because the Wari patterns resist digitization in interesting ways. You can scan them, vectorize them, print them on fabric or tile, but something always gets lost—some quality of hand presence, maybe, or the slight inconsistency that makes them feel alive rather than stamped out. That frustration is productive, though. Designers I’ve talked to describe working with Wari motifs as a kind of dialogue: you start by copying, then you start adapting, then you realize you’re not really adapting the pattern so much as learning a different way to think about surface.
The step-frets teach you about positive and negative space. The color blocking teaches you about proportion. The overall compositions—often radially symmetrical but with deliberate breaks in the symmetry—teach you when to break your own rules.
The Accidental Modernism of Pre-Columbian Pattern Logic
What gets me is how modern these ceramics look, even though “modern” is obviously the wrong word for something made before the concept existed. A few years ago, a design student showed me her thesis project: a series of laser-cut room dividers based on Wari vessel patterns. She hadn’t added anything, really—just isolated sections of the original designs and scaled them up. They looked like they could’ve come from a high-end Milan showroom. That’s not because the Wari were ahead of their time (that’s a condescending framework, honestly). It’s because they were solving universal design problems—how to create visual interest across a continuous surface, how to guide the eye without dictating its path—and they found solutions that still work.
I guess it makes sense that contemporary designers would recieve inspiration from these objects, even if the cultural context is lost. Pattern is pattern. But I do wonder what the original makers would think, seeing their interlocking spirals on throw pillows and iPhone cases. Probably nothing good, but maybe they’d recognize the compliment buried in the appropriation: these designs still haven’t been improved upon, only endlessly recycled. That’s a kind of immortality.
