Prehistoric Textiles

The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean

E. J.W. Barber

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691002248, 9780691035970
• eBook ISBN: 9780691201412
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This pioneering work revises our notions of the origins and early development of textiles in Europe and the Near East. Using innovative linguistic techniques, along with methods from palaeobiology and other fields, it shows that spinning and pattern weaving began far earlier than has been supposed.



Prehistoric Textiles made an unsurpassed leap in the social and cultural understanding of textiles in humankind's early history. Cloth making was an industry that consumed more time and effort, and was more culturally significant to prehistoric cultures, than anyone assumed before the book's publication. The textile industry is in fact older than pottery--and perhaps even older than agriculture and stockbreeding. It probably consumed far more hours of labor per year, in temperate climates, than did pottery and food production put together. And this work was done primarily by women. Up until the Industrial Revolution, and into this century in many peasant societies, women spent every available moment spinning, weaving, and sewing.


The author, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, demonstrates command of an almost unbelievably disparate array of disciplines--from historical linguistics to archaeology and paleobiology, from art history to the practical art of weaving. Her passionate interest in the subject matter leaps out on every page. Barber, a professor of linguistics and archaeology, developed expert sewing and weaving skills as a small girl under her mother's tutelage. One could say she had been born and raised to write this book.


Because modern textiles are almost entirely made by machines, we have difficulty appreciating how time-consuming and important the premodern textile industry was. This book opens our eyes to this crucial area of prehistoric human culture.

PART 1

THE BASIC TEXTILE CRAFTS—THE DATA

CHAPTER 1

THE DOMESTICATION OF FIBERS

Weaving requires suitable materials; without them the craft cannot exist. And so we must start our exploration by asking what textile materials were known to ancient weavers. Given that a particular fiber was available at all, how familiar was it—how available? That is, how long can we ascertain that it was physically present, how long known to and used by the local people, how long even domesticated? We must also know what special properties the various fibers have or had that might have affected their use in textile production, and hence in the development of the industry.

Technically, as we have said, true weaving involves two operationally different sets of elements: a pre-arranged and more or less fixed set, the warp; and a second, inserted set, the weft (the word is derived from the same root as weave). Anyone who tries inserting row after row of weft into a warp will quickly discover that, unless the substance inserted is stiff enough to hold its place, it is much easier and more effective to work with a long weft that continues from one row to the next. It is easier because you don’t have to keep reaching for new material, and it is more effective because each time the weft turns from one row to the next it binds the edge (the “self-edge” or selvedge), keeping the finished work from slipping out of place. We could say then, depending upon the point of view, either that the technique of weaving with long or “continuous” elements solves the problem of how to interlace highly flexible materials, or that “true weaving” differs in a practical way from matting and basketry in using very long and very flexible materials and in creating products that tend toward the soft and floppy rather than toward the stiff and self-shaped. Length and flexibility are thus key qualities in the raw materials of textiles.

No filament produced by nature, however, is long, strong, and flexible enough to qualify outright. Reeds, grasses, and strips of bark, although long enough to go a few rows perhaps, are still too stiff: we classify their products, in general, as mats or baskets. The wonderfully flexible wool fibers, hairs, and most individual vegetable fibers, on the other hand, are too short and breakable to be used very practically without somehow being combined; and the longest natural filament known to weavers, silk, is too fragile to be used singly. In practice, then, the art of weaving generally follows that of spinning: the process by which several single and usually short, pliable filaments are twisted into one long, strong thread. Such a thread, in addition to its greater strength, has all the flexibility of the individual fibers of which it is composed, the flexibility that we associate with textiles.

For an initial idea of the fibers used in ancient times, we can look at the oldest known fragments of weaving, which date from the Neolithic period. The first to be dug up were those found in the mid-19th century in the Swiss “lake dwellings,” some now dated as far back as 3000 B.C. These fragments proved to be of flax, that is, linen, and excellently made, of fine quality and with varied techniques, including “brocaded” (technically, supplementary weft) patterns and elaborately fringed edges (E. Vogt 1937; see Chapter 4 below). Wondering in a letter of September 2, 1860, whether these cloths were locally made or imported, the excavator, Ferdinand Keller, cited in favor of local production the fact that he had also found on the site quantities of flax both as unworked fibers and as hanks of spun thread; and against it he expressed the astonishment of antiquarians everywhere: “How are we to imagine a loom, which even in its simple form is a rather complicated instrument, among people who don’t even know metal?” (Messikommer 1913, 25-26).

But local Neolithic cloths they were, and more Neolithic textiles were to come presently from Egypt. In a 5th-millennium layer of a site in the Faiyum, Caton-Thompson and Gardner found a swatch of coarse linen in a small cooking pot, along with two flints and a fish vertebra. The piece, they reported, “is flax, though not necessarily Linum usitatissimum (Caton-Thompson and Gardner 1934, 46). The find was further supported at the site by the presence of spindle whorls and of flax seeds—this time reportedly Linum usitatissimum, or common domestic flax (ibid., 33, 49).

Since it is rather coarse, and lies among the earliest strata in the cultural sequences leading towards the civilization of Dynastic Egypt, the Faiyum linen looks rather like the beginning of the line of development. And perhaps it was, within Egypt. But if Keller was surprised to find looms and weaving among “pre-metallic” people in Europe, archaeologists were even more surprised, almost exactly a century later, to see fine fabrics turning up among virtually pre-ceramic people in Anatolia.

In 1962, digging into Level VI at the Turkish site of Çatal Hüyük,¹ James Mellaart and his staff palaeobotanist Hans Helbaek uncovered the carbonized remains of a variety of textiles (Mellaart 1963a). The date was set by the radiocarbon analysis of other artifacts as falling at the beginning of the 6th millennium B.C. (Mellaart 1967, 52)—better than a millennium earlier than the Faiyum linen, and nearly three millennia before the ornate Swiss cloth. The fiber of these Anatolian fabrics continued to elude positive identification for some time, however, because of the heavy carbonization that, ironically, had preserved the fabrics to begin with.

The course of the argument over identification is highly instructive to us. In the initial report, Mellaart (1963b) assumes that the fibers are wool and cites the presence of sheep bones in the settlement. In his later, retrospective write-up of the site (1967, but penned considerably earlier), Mellaart continues to suggest wool, this time supporting his argument with palaeobotanical evidence of a sort published earlier by Helbaek (1959; 1960), the expert in ancient flax. Mellaart states (1967, 219), “The possibility that the material was linen, i.e. flax fibre, can be discarded as flax was not grown at Çatal Hüyük, nor anywhere else before c. 5000 B.C.” Harold Burnham, too, in his special report as a textile expert, leans toward the wool hypothesis, mentioning what appear to be scales— wool is scaly, flax is smooth—in one photomicrograph, and the presence of nitrogen, a chemical signalling animal substances. He carefully remarks, though, that the identification is still open to doubt (Burnham 1965, 170 and pl. 31a). Finally, however, the wool expert M. L. Ryder put a sample of the fibers through a masterfully constructed battery of tests, most of which either favored flax slightly or came out quite inconclusive. Even the nitrogen, since it occurred without sulfur, seemed inconclusive to him, because it could well have infiltrated from the human bones that the textiles had encased. As a final drastic measure, a co-worker “then boiled the material with dilute alkali, a treatment which would have destroyed wool, but which in this instance removed the black colour and revealed the characteristic cross-striations of flax when viewed under the microscope through crossed polaroids. This almost unrecognizable material is therefore conclusively identified as flax” (Ryder 1965, 176).

So once again the early textiles turned out to be of plant fiber, specifically of some sort of linen—an interesting fact in itself. But the grounds on which flax had earlier been discarded as a candidate, namely that we have no evidence for the plant being domesticated there or anywhere else that early, provide an equally interesting moral to the story. For the logic may have gone astray in either of two ways. We may simply not have been lucky enough to find other evidence for the earliest domestication of flax.² Or it may be that the flax first used for textiles was not domesticated, but was gathered wild. Archaeologists have discovered elsewhere too that although domestication implies use—some sort of use—lack of domestication does not in itself imply non-use; and so we must look at our few pitiful scraps of evidence for textiles within a much wider, palaeobiological world: the range of habitats of the wild as well as domestic species of fiber-bearing plants and animals, at given points of time in antiquity. Let us now look at each of the fibers in turn.

FLAX

Domestic flax (Linum usitatissimum) provides the fiber we know as linen (Fig. 1.1). In recent times it has been the most important bast fiber (woody plant fiber) for textiles, and, as we have seen, it has been extremely important as far back as our direct evidence for textiles goes.

According to Helbaek, who has done the most definitive work on the history of flax, the most likely of the various wild species to be the progenitor of domestic flax is Linum bienne (formerly called Linum angustifolium) (Helbaek 1959; 1960, 115-18), which, he reports, occurs as a perennial along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coastal areas, and as a winter annual in the foothills of Iran and Iraq-Kurdistan (Helbaek 1959, 105-7). The earliest definite evidence yet located for the domestication of flax comes from sites in northwestern Iraq dated close to 5000 B.C., in the form of improved seeds (Helbaek 1969, 417-18; 1970, 211), and in eastern Iraq ca. 5500, in the form of clearly imported stock (Helbaek 1969, 397). The improved seeds should remind us that flax might have been domesticated originally for its oil-bearing seeds (linseed oil is still important today, and linseed bread can still be found in Central European bakeries), instead of or as well as for its fibrous stem. Thus, although the presence of the domestic plant implies use, it does not guarantee textile use. On the other hand, neither does it always guarantee use for food. The lack of seed remains for flax in Anatolian sites, which puzzled Helbaek (1970, 211-13), could be explained this way: the Anatolians, who, as we now can demonstrate, used flax for textiles well before 5000 B.C., might have raised or collected their flax chiefly for fiber rather than for seed. The flax stem yields the nicest fiber, incidentally, before the seed develops.

1.1 Theban papyrus of the Book of the Dead (18th Dynasty), showing the growing of flax. The flax has been sown close together to force it to grow tall and straight, for better linen fiber. The seed-tops show that it is ready to harvest. (Courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum)

Very recently, another trove of textiles turned up at a pre-pottery Neolithic site, in a small cave at Naḥal Ḥemar in the Judaean desert, in Israel. The artifacts, which have been dated to the 7th millennium B.C. both by radiocarbon and by the nature of the assemblage, include twined, knotted, and needle-made fabrics, although no early pieces in true plain weave (Bar-Yosef 1985; Tamar Schick, pers. comm. 1985; see Chapter 4). Once again we see flax in abundant use long before 5000 B.C.; but whether it was domestic or gathered wild we can’t yet say.

In any case, the domestication as well as use of flax must have started in or at the edge of locations where it grew wild. The domesticant must then have spread from such places to lower altitudes and drier locations, where it could thrive if humans watered it (Helbaek 1959, 117; 1969, 397; 1970, 211-13). The presence of Linum usitatissimum itself can be charted in northern Iraq (a home area for the wild ancestor) and southwestern Iran before 5000 B.C., and in southern Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Switzerland, and Germany between 5000 and 3000 B.C. (Helbaek 1959, 118-19; J. Renfrew 1973, 120). As it spread into widely different environments, it diversified in form to adapt to local conditions. Thus in Egypt it turns up as a large-seeded, summer-annual type with a single stem (though sown in Egypt in October or November to avoid the scorching heat there), whereas in Switzerland it appears as a small-seeded, multiple-stemmed winter annual (Helbaek 1959, 105). When assessing the domain of flax, however, we must not forget to include the wild varieties, for it was possible to collect these also, wherever they occurred.

The physical and chemical properties of flax fibers have much to do with their use. The fibers originate inside the stem of the plant, where their function is to protect and support the channels that carry nutrients along the length of the plant. These fibers, known as bast, occur in bundles of overlapping strands among the sieve (food-carrying) cells. They form a ring around the woody core, and are in turn surrounded by a sort of skin or rind. The “ultimate fibers” of bast, which are long, thin cells that reach a few centimeters in length and are joined end to end in long strands, are held together in these bundles by a matrix of pectinous substances (Kirby 1963, 3, 22-23; Durrant 1976, 190). In order to obtain the bast fibers, then, all of these other parts, with the exception of some of the matrix found within the bundles, must somehow be stripped or eaten away.

The age-old way of doing this—and we have both ancient Egyptian representations and Swiss Neolithic tool complexes proving the antiquity of the method—consists basically of the following steps. First, the flax is pulled up by the roots at the desired stage of growth: the younger the plant is, the finer and paler the fibers will be; the older it is, the coarser and stronger (Geijer [1972] 1979, 6; Hess 1958, 286). In Egypt appar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Preface
• Site Maps
• Chronology (in Logarithmic Scale) of Main Eras Mentioned, 20,000-400 B.C.
• Chronology of Later Cultures Mentioned, 3000-400 B.C.
• Introduction
• Part I: The Basic Textile Crafts — the Data
• 1. The Domestication of Fibers
• 2. Spinning
• 3. Looms and Weaving
• 4. The Textile Weaves: (1) The Beginnings
• 5. The Textile Weaves: (2) Egypt
• 6. The Textile Weaves: (3) The Bronze Age
• 7. The Textile Weaves: (4) The Iron Age
• 8. The Textile Weaves: (5) An Overall View
• 9. Felt and Felting
• 10. Dyes
• Part II: Discussions
• Introduction to Part II
• 11. Beginnings Revisited
• 12. Word Excavation
• 13. Women’s Work
• 14. The Weight Chase
• 15. Minoans, Mycenaeans, and Keftiu
• 16. And Penelope?
• Coda
• Appendices
• A. The Loom Weights: Data Table and Its Bibliography for Chapter 3
• B. The Hollow Whorls: List and Its Bibliog-raphy for Chapter 14
• C. Aegean Representations of Cloth: List and Its Bibliography for Chapter 15
• D. Egyptian Tombs with Aegean Data: List and Its Bibliography for Chapter 15
• Bibliography
• Index