When approached as raw textile materials, plants provide a window onto the cultural dynamics of the Pacific coast. Cotton (Gossypium barbadense), whose origin dates back around 6000 years ago in South America, became an essential textile resource for the manufacture of netting, fishing utensils, and artifacts. When cotton wass introduced into plant fibre technologies, it triggered not only a transition from an economy of immediate-return of wild plants such as Typha sp., Scirpus sp., and Asclepias sp., to an economy of G. barbadense cultivation; it also became a resource that gave rise to new dependencies. To understand cotton as a catalyst for change in ecological, technological, and social relations is to re-signify this plant as a protagonist in the social dynamics of the Preceramic Period. This paper discusses how the initial use of cotton promoted dynamics of ecological, economic, a...