Textiles and Fiber Arts as Catalysts for Ideas

Most cloth today is true weave, in which the weft simply goes over and under successive warp threads (Fig. 1c; possibly in a pattern) rather than twisting around the warp or around other weft (twining; Fig. 1a–b). Because of the twist, twined fabrics are inherently more stable than those in true weave (consider how easily a torn edge of modern cloth frays out). Early cloth-like fabrics were therefore twined, as at Pavlov and in the earliest known cloth in the Western Hemisphere (from at least 8000 B.C.E.). The only advantage to true weave is that, unlike twining, the weaving process is mechanizable, making the production of true-weave cloth many times faster than that of twined cloth. When you can make so much so fast, the problem of unraveling becomes less important (and one can prevent raveling by binding the raw edges). Our first proof of true weaving occurs at Çatal Höyük, in central Turkey, around 6000 B.C.E., where we find a large amount of plain-weave Figure 3. Freshly "pleached" hedge: thin, live branches have been bent obliquely to the right and woven across upright stakes. Powys, Wales, 1989. E. J. W. BARBER Figure 4. Earliest extant depiction of loom. At bottom: horizontal ground loom with warp stretched between two beams pegged to the ground. At top: either weft-preparation or a mat loom. Painted dish, Badari, Egypt, c. 4200 B.C.E.© PETRIE MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON linen—coarse and fine; tight and open; hemmed, fringed, and with reinforced woven selvedges of three sorts—and a very small amount of twined linen. The sheer statistics, as well as the fine and even weaving, tell us that these people knew and used the heddle—the invention that mechanized the loom.

Heddles are difficult to explain abstractly (although easy to use) and must have been very difficult to think up. The evidence suggests that the heddle was invented only once in human history and spread across the world from there. In 1900, when extensive ethnographic work was being done in remote parts of the earth, it was clear that many human cultures had never got the idea of weaving with heddles, or even, in a few cases, of any kind of weaving.

Let's imagine a loom in which the warp lies horizontally. The problem is to separate the warp threads so that one half—every second thread—is lifted. When the weft passes through the resulting "tunnel" (called the shed, from an old word for "divide"), it leaves its trail under one (lifted) thread, over the next (unlifted) thread, under the next, and so on. This can be accomplished easily by shoving a rod, called a shed bar, through the warp in exactly this way: then lift the rod, and you open the shed.

But the problem of lifting the other half of the warp, for what is called the countershed, is not so easy. You could stick a second rod into the opposite shed, but you will find your two rods interfere with each other hopelessly: one prevents the other from being raised. What you need is a discontinuous rod. Impossible.

The solution is to lay the second rod on top of the warp (not the obvious place), where it won't interfere with the shed rod, then make a series of string nooses (heddles), each of which is attached to this rod (the heddle bar) and to one warp thread. Among them, they catch up all the intervening warp threads that still need to be raised. Now raise the heddle bar, and you open the countershed.

The solution of this difficult three-dimensional problem produced the world's first complex machine, one with multiple moving parts, before 7000 B.C.E., more than a millennium before the invention of fired pottery and nearly four thousand years before the hot-working of metals.