Textiles and Fiber Arts as Catalysts for Ideas

Toward the end of the Paleolithic, people developed the idea of interlacing string or other long thin elements in a regular way to form a broad fabric: impressions of twined net or cloth were found at Pavlov (see above) from 25,000 B.C.E., and fragments of mats and baskets are often found in the Near East from 7000 B.C.E. onwards. In a sense, the idea of interlacing is far older, since other large primates, such as chimps, will loosely "weave" together a few branches in a treetop to make a comfortable place to nap. (One can still see pleached [plaited] fences woven of the live branches of hedge plants in rural Wales [Fig. 3], and house walls woven of dead branches [wattle] were common in earlier times.) But interlacing in a regular way to make a portable object was a much newer idea.

Cloth differs from mats and baskets in one important respect. Mats and baskets, which hold their shape, are made principally from stiff materials, whereas cloth (whose prime quality is floppiness) is made entirely from pliable string or thread. A little experimentation will convince the reader that one cannot compactly interlace several pieces of string that are simply lying about: one set of string must be held under tension—a substitute for stiffness. This "foundation" set of threads is called the warp, and the frame that holds it is the loom (Fig. 4). Then it's easy to lace in crossways a second set—the weft or woof (both from the same ancient linguistic root as weave). There are also ways of holding several sets of material taut, as in braiding and other forms of plaiting and netting; but tension is basic to all of these.