Textiles and Fiber Arts as Catalysts for Ideas

At some unknown time before 25,000 B.C.E. (when we get our first direct evidence), humans figured out that you could make long, strong flexible strings by twisting together thin, easily broken Figure 1. Earliest weaves: (a) twining with paired wefts; (b) warp-wrap twining; (c) plain-weave. COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR plant fibers. Twist adds great strength, as one learns by twisting together a handful of fibers from a dead vine after the winter weather has rotted away (retted) the woody parts. The resulting string can be used in numerous ways to make life easier and more convenient: for tying things together (increasing one's power to carry, to store, and to make compound tools) or tying things down, and for crafting snares and nets (making hunting and fishing far more efficient). String is probably the special tool—almost unseen in the material record—that allowed the human race to move, during the Upper Paleolithic, into many ecological niches they otherwise could not have handled. All human cultures have string. Actual impressions of twisted plant fiber string and twined netting were found at Pavlov, Czech Republic, from 25,000 B.C.E., the middle of the Upper Paleolithic (Fig. 1a). These remains are already so sophisticated that string-and net-making must have been practiced for some time, possibly since the start of the era of cave art, c. 40,000 B.C.E. Other evidence of Paleolithic string and its uses has been found across Europe from 20,000 B.C.E., including increasing numbers of bone needles and fine-holed beads.

Once the domestication of plants and animals began in the Near East at the beginning of the Neolithic, c. 9000 B.C.E., evidence for fiber arts increases dramatically (partly because the newly permanent settlements make it easier to find human artifacts at all), allowing us to see new ideas in fiber and string technology.

Flax, still today an important fiber plant, was one of the first plants domesticated, and one of the first animals domesticated was the sheep (specifically Ovis orientalis). But sheep were domesticated for meat, not wool, as most people assume. Their coats were not soft and woolly, but coarse and bristly like a deer's, and it evidently took some four thousand years of inbreeding and selection to develop usably woolly sheep. Before that, domestic sheep and cattle were raised to be killed for food, but around 4000 B.C.E. people conceived the radical idea that they did better by keeping the sheep alive. Instead of providing one feast and one hide, each animal could provide a continuing supply of wool for clothing and of milk for food (preservable as yogurt and cheese). This change, as revolutionary as domestication itself, came to be known as the "secondary products revolution." Wool, from ever woollier sheep, is still one of the most important fibers worldwide.

Figure 2. Women weighing and preparing wool, spinning with drop-spindle, weaving on warp-weighted loom. From Greek wedding vase, 560 B.C.E. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, FLETCHER FUND, 1931 (31.11.10) PHOTOGRAPH, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Another key Neolithic invention was the spindle. Plant fibers are often long, making them easy to twist by hand into a single length of string. But for longer pieces, or if the fibers are short, one encounters a problem, for the string, once twisted, becomes quite ornery the moment you let go of one end to add more fiber to the other. It either untwists or gnarls up in a tangle, both effects being counterproductive. The solution is to wind it up on something, say a stick, which both stores it and keeps it from tangling or untwisting. But then the easiest way to twist more fiber onto the free end is to turn the stick itself. That's what a spindle is: a rod for holding the finished thread while adding twist to the newly forming part. The spindle can be twirled in the hand (hand-held), or with one end in a dish (supported), or hanging in the air from the newly forming thread (dropped) (Figs. 2 and 10). The speed and steady inertia of its spin can be increased by adding a little flywheel to the rod: an apple or potato will do, but we start finding small clay disks or wheels for the purpose, called spindle whorls, early in the Neolithic, by 6000 B.C.E. Spinning with a whorl-weighted spindle is many times faster (and easier) than twisting without a spindle.

So from the notion of twist to the notion of twirling a stick to the addition of the spindle whorl, humans came up with their first ideas of rotary motion, translated only much later, c. 3000 B.C.E., to the idea of the load-bearing wheel—a key idea that seems now to have been thought up only once, and in the area where spindles were invented.

Spindle technology was so easy, efficient, and portable that it remained essentially unchanged for seven thousand years, until the invention of the foot-powered spinning wheel in the Middle Ages, a design that quadrupled the speed of spinning and that was apparently jump-started by ideas from China, and finally, the spinning jenny—a hand-powered multiple spinning machine—during the industrial revolution. Hand spindles are still used in rural areas, however, where women make thread from fiber while doing other chores.