Tocapu was a decorative art form used in the Inca Empire, present in various media such as textiles, ceramics, and wooden objects. It is made up of variable geometric patterns, which can conform to a separate unit or a field of multiple elements. They are usually arranged in rectangular or square units forming rows.

Some colonial chroniclers associated the tocapu with the Andean demiurge Viracocha, as was the case with Cristóbal de Molina el Cusqueño, in his Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas (1575). Almost all mentions of the tocapu in sources from the early colonial period relate it to textiles or as painted on other objects: In Ludovico Bertonio’s Aymara dictionary (1612), the term appears as “dress or clothing of the Inca made with a thousand wonders”; in the anonymous Quechua-Spanish dictionary of 1586, tocapu is defined as “work that is drilled, woven, or on vases, panels & etc.”

Some scholars have proposed that tocapu was a symbolic visual language. In the absence of any documentary or historical evidence, the derivation and meaning of tocapu remain obscure. We do know that during the Inca period, only people affiliated with the state administration were allowed to wear clothing with tocapu designs. This may indicate that these geometric patterns were associated with high social status and, perhaps, place of origin.

The geometric patterns of the tocapu decorated a multitude of objects such as tunics, vessels of various shapes, in particular the queros (ritual drinking vessels made of ceramic or wood), wooden panels, and funerary monuments.