Shortly after sheep and other animals were being domesticated for their wool, the Chinese people were domesticating moths for their silk.
The idea that moth cocoons could be used for thread was not a solely Chinese discovery; there is evidence that wild silk moths were incredibly popular in Greece for their fibers. About 5000 years ago, though, China carefully curated their moths until they had just a few breeds that basically would eat only mulberry leaves. Within a thousand years, the moths had become unable to reproduce without the help of humans or fly as adults.
The production of silk from these domesticated moths led to the ancient empires of Rome, Greece and Egypt finding it much simpler to import the silk than to attempt to produce it themselves. The formed what we now call ‘The Silk Route’, a trading web to bring silk and spices from Eastern Asia to Western Europe. In return, Western Europe sent honey, wine and livestock. They also traded paper, gunpowder and disease, changing how humans interacted with each other over a millennia and a half. The Roman Dodecahedron talked about earlier was probably influenced by gold beads that traveled the Silk Route as well.
In many of the areas that still produce silk, the dead pupae are still often cooked and eaten, mostly as a savory snack food And in a curious circle, there is now an ‘Ahimsa silk’, made from wild moths who have left their cocoons, and considered a more ethical fiber.
What did animal fibers mean for humans? It started another textile revolution. But first, Africa.
As we talked about last time, the earliest sheep ‘rooed’ their wool, so early farmers could collect the wool fibers easily. And the cleaning of the fibers makes the understanding that felt was an obvious first step on the way to using wool.
Shearing a sheep would not have been an easy task for the early herders. Stone tools were still being used when animals were being used for their wool. Tools made of stone are extremely sharp and using a scraping blade on a struggling sheep could easily lead to accidents for either the person or the animal. Scraping the wool off a hide alone would be much easier, but defeats the idea of harvesting from a sheep and keeping it alive.
We do have records of the Egyptians using bronze tools to shear sheep. As humans began working with iron, tools to shear animals were made with iron. These tools would make it far easier for people to clip the wool off their animals instead of combing it out or collecting it when it fell.
Next time, we’ll talk about the other animal fiber, silk.
It’s hard for me to comprehend that for millennia, humans used either fur or leather, or plant based fiber. Animal based fiber came later in our history, with the domestication of animals. Wool and silk seem like such basic fibers it’s hard for me to believe they are relatively modern.
While sheep were domesticated around 13-11,000 years ago, they were used for their milk, meat and skins. They weren’t used for their wool until 8 thousand years ago. The earliest woven sheep wool garments are from 6-5000 years ago. The earliest woven plant based textile evidence dates to about 34 thousand years ago. Goats were domesticated even later than sheep, and their wool less selected for.
Llamas and Alpacas were domesticated even later than sheep and goats, but followed the same trajectory of being used for meat, skins, and milk for a millennium or two before people started to use their wool. It’s believed that instead of cutting off the whole fleece in one go, early shepherds would comb their animals hair and use that for spinning and weaving. This is extremely believable. But it’s also possible that they simply picked up the wool.
Very old breeds of sheep do not shed over the course of the year, as many other animals and modern sheep do. They ‘roo’, which means as the weather gets hotter, they shed their entire coat in sheets, much like a snake sheds its skin.
As we’ve already seen, spinning and weaving took an extremely long time to make fabric. A large hunk of sheep wool, messy and clumpy and dirty, could easily become felt, especially since the wool would probably be cleaned after being collected off the sheep. Working wool while cleaning it would mat the wool into itself and form a dense thick cloth. This would save so much time from having to spin and weave the wool and would create a dense warm and water resistant material for shoes, outerwear and bedding.
I’d like to briefly aside into another way of making fabric without looms, which would be knitting, crocheting, or other ways of making knots with fiber. These ways use tools to help make repeated knots, and those knots together work well for creating a fabric with a stretch that can be everything from feather light and lacy to heavy and near weatherproof— especially if it has felting done to it.
There is a reason I want to talk about it this early.
You probably know about that Roman dodecahedron knitting-fingers-for-gloves tool that has been flying around the internet for a decade. These tools have been found in Roman sites all around the outskirts of Rome. The first one was found in the 1700’s. No one quite knows what they were made for, although there have been many, many theories throughout the centuries.
Internet knitters have decided it’s a tool for knitting fingers of gloves. There are a few reasons that is unlikely. While gloves have been around for millennia (there is evidence to think they are prehistoric), knitting has not. Early gloves were made of woven fabric or animal skins. King Tut’s gloves, found beautifully preserved in his tomb, were made of woven linen. Knitting can be traced to only about 1000ce, a good 600 years before we hear of knitting anywhere.
Even if we look at knitting the way we look at looms, and understand that two sharp sticks would never make it into the archaeological record, unlike weaving, we have no fabrics or fragments of anything knitted. We have no images of knitted items. There is no myth surrounding knitting, no ancient tales of people knitting straw into gold, no etymological path to follow. There is no historical record of knitted items, at all, until about 1000. It seems obvious that knitting didn’t arrive fully complete suddenly, but there is ample reason to think of it as a more recent innovation from what we commonly call the Middle East and moved through the Eastern Mediterranean into Europe.
This may sound very late for knitting, and knitting does show up in journals and reports as being older than 1000 years, it’s now generally accepted these were mistakes. Archaeologists and scholars had been calling ‘nalbinding’ ‘knitting’ when they discovered pieces of a knotted thread, which, again, craftspeople sought to correct that mistake when presented with samples of early knitting in museums. Reviewing and analyzing the research has shown that once again, knitting is just over 1000 years old.
Going back to this mysterious Roman item, there is nothing about them that says knitting aide. They are mostly delicate, some have wax on them, they are often found with coins. They show no signs of wear, they do not have numbers inscribed on them, and the largest of them weigh over two pounds. They may be religious (that’s a possibility no matter what item is found- it’s a first guess for everything), it may not have a use at all, and some people wonder if they may have been just a final metallurgical exam to show your skills. And the knitting we have from 1000ce is about 32 stitches an INCH. This tool creates a very coarse finger for a glove even in modern times. It seems a stretch that a very expensive object would be used to make coarse fingers on extremely fine gloves that were made with much cheaper needles.
And it completely ignores that the same shape was found in South East Asia along the silk road that *predates* the Roman items, but were created as gold beads, and not large enough to be used as a tool for anything.
Using different points of view is important (see ‘nalbinding’ mistaken for knitting), but it’s also important to keep an open mind and not think anyone group has the one true answer.
So we’ve discussed how simple it would be for the earliest loom technology to not have an imprint in the archaeology. It really seems to me that weaving could not have been too far behind spinning. That we have found pieces of fabric (a rare find in itself) with selvage edges which were obviously made with looms proves that looms existed before we have record of them.
The earliest looms we do know about were about 12,000 years ago. While this corresponds to approximately when we domesticated sheep, it would be several more millennia before humans would stop tanning sheep skins as clothing, and start shearing sheep for their wool leaving the animal alive. The earliest looms must have been continuing the use of plant based fibers. Cotton, hemp and linen fibers were woven into set pieces of fabric, much of which would have a slit cut in the neck (or created during weaving) and then have the edges sewn up, leaving holes for arms. This simple tunic, using the entire piece of fabric that had been woven, formed the basis for early clothing throughout the world. The realization that silk fibers and the hair from animals such as alpacas and sheep revolutionized clothing and animal husbandry, and allowed people to live in less hospitable climates, even if the use of tanned skins started this migration.
What the archaeological record does show is that by 400 BCE, commercial looms are found. People were making more fabric than they needed and selling the surplus as a livelihood, not merely for a little extra cash. It’s staggering to wonder how many spinsters they would need to create so much fabric, as the next innovation in spinning would not be invented until the first millennium. We have no record of commercial yarn sales yet, but these weaving shops would have needed a lot of yarn.
The tale of Rumpelstiltskin apparently dates back millennia, and suddenly makes more sense. A daughter who can spin quickly and well can obviously ‘spin straw to gold’, or raw materials to money.
After spending some time in India, Debra Luker has collected her inspirations, sketchbooks, and art into The Pigment Trail. Just flipping through the book is a feast for the eyes, as huge two page spreads full of color and texture abound in the book. The colors are a part of \Indian life, and, as Luker explains, change with contrasting elements (a person wearing yellow walking past a vibrant blue wall), the time of day and the lighting, and wear over time. The same image moves and changes as you watch it.
The subjects of the photographs range from miniature drawings posed with flower to huge street scenes of active daily life. And, of course, both the textural and color elements include textiles, hand dyed, with zips of lace and gold work, of brocades and beads.
This is not a how to book, however. While Luker talks of dying fabrics, instructions are not given. Most of the book, in fact, is very lacking in text at all. Instead, we are shown the authors sketchbooks and the real life Indian inspirations for them.
While it is an amazing work while reading it, it lacks the substance that would make a technician return to it. While it inspired me to retake up an embroidery sketchbook, want to design a peacock feather piece, and to look up Zardozi embroidery (Indian metal work), I would only recommend it as a gorgeous coffee table book or requesting it from your local library.
Right now in our little study of fabrics we’re looking at the gap between the discovery of how to twist fibers into thread/ the invention of spinning and the technology of the loom.
The understanding of simple weaving can’t be too far behind string. Weaving string or grasses or anything around fingers is a common pastime for fidgeters. It would not take much more to tie a few strings together and then knot and weave them to make a strap to use as is, or to attach to other things. Imitating a spider web and creating a web of thread in a forked branch to weave around is also fairly simple to see happening. Setting supports in the ground to use as the edges of a loom would also work. And people today still use ‘stick weaving’, which to me seems an extension of the finger weaving. Multiple long thin sticks with eyes (like needles) could be threaded and laid close together. Weaving is then done over the sticks, which are them drawn through the woven work to allow for the strap to grow longer and larger. This would also leave no signs of a loom in the archaeological record.
Many grasses and sturdier fibers can also be ‘self loomed’, building a frame of the material in the shape of the item you wanted – a bowl, a basket, a mat- and then weaving around it. It’s easy to see that the technology of looms probably existed long before we have any remaining evidence of it, as the materials to use them were likely broken down for other uses or simply didn’t last in the record.
Pretty much every one things of sparking wine and New Year’s Eve. Many ears ago, I made this earring to wear for the holiday, because one of the best things about this hobby is the ability to customize everything.
This earring is a little more complicated to create than my other brick stitch earrings. If you know how to do a square stitch, or feel ok compensating, you are set. If all you know is the simple brick, feel free to check out my tiktok, or ask me for a link to the video.
Attached is a PDF with this graphed out. Download it for free, dig out some scrap beads and Happy New Year!
Weaving as the practice of lacing grasses and twigs and branches and anything else that could be bent and interlaced together dates back as long ago as clothes and thread, about 30,000 years. Loom weaving came about approximately 12,000 years ago. So there is a huge gap between the technologies of thread and the technology of looms.
It is highly unlikely to think that our forebears did not think to weave thread they spun together in the same way they had learned grasses and branches could be woven. And the oldest evidence that they did apply weaving to string long before looms are found dates back to 27000 years ago, with a find where a long lost (apparently) linen woven fabric left an imprint on clay.
So, it is fairly obvious that people were weaving thread long before we have a record of it. But don’t think of it as modern cloth— or even a simple weave like burlap. If you have ever seen a friendship bracelet, you can see a type of weaving that can be done without a loom. Knotted and woven fiber could very possibly been used for clothes and embellishments as well as strapping long before looms came on the scene. Obviously, items such as these would have taken many hours to complete, but one thing our forebears had was time. I can’t see why such labor intensive items would not have been respected for the creativity and skill and time they would take to make. If you see the fairly recent outfit worn by Egtved Girl, you’ll see she was buried with a knotted and woven skirt. While she is only about 3300 years ago, her outfit could easily have been made with technology millennia before.
Weaving and knotting isn’t just for clothing and embellishments. String and the skills to manipulate it would have been used to make nets for carrying and trapping. String likely was also used to wrap things to make hand grips, for decoration, perhaps to mark property. And some archeologists point to the type and placement of selvages on some imprints or woven remains as evidence of the existence of certain types of looms that we have yet to find remnants of.
Even if looms weren’t around before 12000 years ago, there were ways to weave that didn’t require formal equipment.
We’ve already explored the first things that would count as ‘fabric’ and ‘thread’ in the past few articles. We even touched on how weaving plants together probably introduced early humans to weaving the cords and twines.
Sometime after the discovery of twisted thread, the earliest spinning tools were invented. A ‘drop spindle’ is very possibly the very first spinning tool. Essentially an early spindle was just a stick stuck slightly off center through a weight. This simple tool would allow a spinner to even walk while spinning, being a very very early multitasking capable tool. A distaff is the tool that would hold the fiber to be fed to the spindle.
Spinning became incredibly important. Before we domesticated animals and learned to spin their hair (or cocoons), we were finding long-fiber wild grasses nearly everywhere, and relatively easy to harvest and prep. Archeologists have found linen shards dating to about 30,000 years ago, long before agriculture.
This sort of spinning was done for tens of thousands of years, until only about 1000 years ago. Someone figured out how to make a machine that would speed up the spinning process, and the spinning wheel (still human powered) sped everything up. Spinning prior to that point was a long process that involved everyone in a household who could to spin constantly. Wheels allowed for far fewer people (normally women) to need to dedicate their time to it.
And yes, the term ‘spinster’ came out of the usefulness of unmarried women to sit and spin their days and help the households. However, so many men spun as well, in the 1600’s English speakers created the work ‘spinstress’ to distinguish between a male and female spinster (despite the — ster already being a female suffix)
In 1764, the Spinning Jenny was invented, which allowed one worker to spin eight separate spools at once. Adaptions continued to be made until the machines produced finer and stronger thread than humans could. Spinning is now both a hobby and a revolutionary act- Ghandi was known to spin his own thread to have clothes completely homemade.
