File:Woman Navajo Blanket or manta 01.jpg

English: or manta, finely twill-woven in crimson red commercial 4-ply wool yarn, and two shades of indigo blue handspun wool, with a richly variegated blue field, flanked by parallel bands in red, each end with darker blue bands.

41 in. by 52 in.

Exhibited Saint Louis Art Museum: “Navajo Weavings from the Andy Williams Collection,” October 26, 1997 – January 4, 1998 Literature Ann Lane Hedlund, Navajo Weavings from the Andy Williams Collection, 1997, p. 30, no. 4 Catalogue Note

For a discussion of the woman's shawl see Baer, 1989: "The manta, or woman's shawl, is one of the oldest forms of weaving in the Southwest and may have prehistoric antecedents among the warp-faced alpaca mantas woven in pre-Columbian Bolivia and Peru. Navajo weavers learned to weave mantas from the Hopi and Zuni weavers during the late 1600s. The majority of Navajo mantas have natural brown centers, but you occasionally see mantas with white or pink centers. Blue center mantas are the rarest of all Navajo mantas..." For a comparable, see Sotheby's New York, December 1998, lot 94