Textiles and Fiber Arts as Catalysts for Ideas

Why was textile production such a catalyst for new ideas? Presumably because textiles had such important uses that people were pushed hard to improve the technology. But what were these uses, and how did we become so dependent on them?

Cloth is so perishable that until the advent of writing we have very little direct evidence of how textiles were used in early eras. (Writing began in the Near East shortly before 3000B.C.E., by which time humans had been speaking for more than 100,000 years.) But we have a few interesting hints.

As already discussed, string alone enabled people to catch and hold more; nets did likewise. But cloth enabled people to cover and wrap things, and especially, because of its extreme flexibility, things of odd or lumpy shape—like the human body.

Already at 20,000 B.C.E., still in the Upper Paleolithic, we have a few representations of people wearing clothing clearly made from twisted fiber string. For example, a carved "Venus" (or fertility) figure from Lespugue, France, depicts a plump Figure 7. Jacquard loom. © BETTMANN/CORBIS woman wearing a so-called string skirt, a belt-band supporting a row of strings that hang down like a skirt or apron (Fig. 8b). (The carver marked not only the twists on the strings but even how the strings are coming untwisted at the bottom.) Other Venuses of the same era from Russia (Figs. 8a and c) are shown wearing string skirts or twisted bands worn across the chest, while the Venus of Willendorf (Austria) wears a spirally worked cap on her head.

All this clothing, clearly, was fashioned from string. Yet none is of any use for either warmth or what we would call modesty. So why did Paleolithic people trouble to make such clothing?

Apparently to communicate messages. String skirts continue to appear on European figurines through the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, by which time we begin to find actual string skirts preserved on buried women (in Denmark, where woolen garments often survive), and we see them occasionally in Iron Age Greece (in literature, and on figurines and vases). These women—both those buried and those represented and talked about—are clearly not children, but full-grown. In recent centuries such skirts still turn up as a key part of women's folk costumes (rural dress) throughout eastern Europe, from the Adriatic to the Urals and from southern Greece to Latvia.

Wherever we find representations or physical remains, the woman has reached child-bearing age; wherever we find direct information about the skirt's meaning, from Homer to the Figure 8. Paleolithic "Venus" figures of c. 20,000 B.C.E. wearing string clothing: (a) cords across chest (Kostenki, Russia); (b) string skirt in rear (Lespugue, France); (c) string skirt in front (Gagarino, Russia). The string skirt apparently signaled child-bearing status. COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR modern ethnographers, it invariably indicates something about the ability or willingness to bear children. In eastern Europe, in fact, we learn that girls are not allowed to wear them until they reach puberty, at which point they must do so. In short, the string skirt (or its surrogate) gives the viewer crucial biosocial information about both the females who wear it and those who do not.

A quite different piece of clothing, in these societies, signals that the woman is also married and therefore no longer available: a headdress completely covering the hair. (It was, and in some places still is, widely believed that a woman's fertility resides in her hair.) In modern Western societies, this message is conveyed by a piece of jewelry, the wedding ring.

What we see, then, is that humans started to devise clothing as a means of communication, and not, as is generally supposed, for warmth. We tend to forget that prolonged exposure to less-than-extreme cold inures the body to frigid weather (and, in fact, the humans in most depictions prior to the Bronze Age, which begins about 3000 B.C.E. in the Near East, are naked). Although not so flexible as language, clothing signals have the advantage that they do not die away instantly, but rather persist over time. If a woman wears a wedding ring, she doesn't have to keep saying "I'm taken" every time a man looks at her. The earliest signals sent by clothing that we can detect thus concern marital status. Such signals gradually formed a vital communication system parallel to but independent of language.

Although harder to pin down, early uses also include marking special events, particularly religious rites, and along with this, marking people central to those events. For instance, Upper Paleolithic cave art includes a depiction of what appears to be a dancing man clad in what look like a deerskin and antlers (Trois Frères, France), presumably involved in a ritual.

One of the earliest clear depictions we have of a religious scene is on a tall alabaster vase from the great Mesopotamian Figure 9. Naked workers (middle) and clothed elite (above) involved in agricultural ritual. Adapted from stone vase, Uruk (Warka), c. 3200 B.C.E. city of Uruk, shortly before 3000 B.C.E. (Fig. 9). The bottom registers depict the key domestic plants and animals (wheat and sheep); above them, lines of naked workmen carry baskets laden with agricultural produce. In the top register we see people wearing kilts or long robes presenting some of this produce to a long-robed woman who, judging from the banners hung next to her, is either the goddess Inanna or her priestess. So people already "dressed up" for religious ceremonies, and the textiles sometimes marked the religious space itself.

We still tend to dress more specially for church, synagogue, mosque, or temple; special shawls, robes, or hats usually mark key participants; and the place of worship is generally set off or "dressed" with special textiles, from altar cloths to prayer rugs to screens and pavilions. In fact, in many cultures (for example, Indonesia or classical Greece), the laying out or hanging of special textiles serves to make that space sacred for the moment, in order to carry out a wedding, funeral, judgment, or other rite. Anyone of that culture, seeing that textile, recognizes its significance, although others probably will not.

The Uruk vase shows us something beyond religious status, however. While the peasants are naked, the elite are coming to be distinguished by their clothing. This idea of social status as economic and political, rather than solely marital or religious, seems to begin with the concentration of masses of people into cities in the fourth millennium B.C.E. and to spread with the quest for metals that ensued.

Metals were the first important commodity that people could neither grow nor find in their backyards; obtaining them required organizing resources to support expeditions to mine ore or to trade for finished metal. This meant increasingly permanent stratification into leaders and followers (instead of temporary stratification for local warfare) and quickly led to the differentiation between those who had power—and easy access to imported goods—and those who did not. The ancient monuments show us that soon everyone in "civilized" areas took up clothing. Wearing clothes even came to be viewed as a mark of being civilized, to the Chinese and to many other cultures.