Working with fiber has generated many seminal ideas in the course of human history, including the first notions of rotary motion, machines, and computers. The fiber arts also have provided an important means of expression of the human condition.
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 i…
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 stri…
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 hedd…
Once heddles were invented, loom weaving spread rapidly, spawning different types of looms. Narrow band-looms must have come first, then wider ones, with the warp stretched horizontally (as in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Southeast Asia), vertically (Syria), or aslant (Europe and Central and South America), and tensioned with twin beams (Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Syria), weights (Europe), or the b…
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? 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, beca…
As textile technology progressed, who wore what often became strictly codified. In Egypt, only the pharaoh folded his kilt with the left lappet on top; in Rome, only the emperor could wear a garment entirely of purple, and only noble citizens a purple stripe. This meant the viewer could read rank and station from another's costume, even, in some cases, down to the last degree. In China, for…
We read in classical Greek literature that cloth tents were set up temporarily on temple grounds for celebrations. These pavilions were constructed from textiles decorated with elaborately woven scenes—rare and expensive textiles dedicated to the deities as votive gifts and stored in temple storehouses. Temples served as the treasuries, and indeed, museums, of the ancient world, just as cat…
Adovasio, J. M., Olga Soffer, and B. Klima. "Palaeolithic Fibre Technology: Interlaced Woven Finds from Pavlov I, Czech Republic, c. 26,000 year, B.P." Antiquity 70 (1996): 526–534. Earliest preserved textile remains yet found. Anawalt, Patricia Reiff. "A Comparative Analysis of the Costumes and Accoutrements of the Codex Mendoza." In The Codex Mendoza, edited by…
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