Director Christine Shaw
While this area is not part of the Butser experimental programme, it is an important element of demonstrations, school programmes and, occasionally, courses.
More importantly, for students, the place of textiles in early economies should be appreciated. Much of the experimental work of Peter Reynolds demonstrated the economic elements of provision of food and of shelter. Provision of clothing was a third vital element in early economies, pre-dating the pottery era and other later manufacturing activities.
In the context of man's existence, it should not be overlooked that the Industrial Revolution was only "yesterday". Equally, many of the earliest manufacturing inventions were directly related to improving the efficiency of producion of both yarn and cloth, displacing what had by then grown to be "cottage industries".
This short over-view does not deal specifically with woven or non-woven textiles but rather the techniques prior to their manufacture. It is clear that, especially in colder climates, furs and animal skins were a readily available source of protection against the weather. The real advance, beyond hunting, was when man learnt methods of using hair, wools and vegetable fibre to form "cloth". Craft workers are in no doubt that felt was the first such material (McGavock & Lewis 2000). Academic documentation of the earliest and succeeding examples of felt, known from the archaeological record, is extensively covered by Barber (1991a). The commonest form of felt is made by interlocking free (unspun) fibres into a "pad" and this phenomenon would be frequently observed in any handling of such fibres, so discovery could be multifocus, though Barber asserts felt to be confined to Asia and Europe prior to this millennium. She also discusses felt made from spun and knitted yarn, though this appears to be a later derivative. Felt is a bulky material not suited to Neolithic or later haute couture !
It was not till it was appreciated that fibres could be twisted to create a "yarn" that any progress, towards what we today understand as cloth, could be made. Whether the twisting of fibres, grasses or creepers for making constructional "twine" was the first step will never be known but, as recently as 1996, the BBC broadcast an edition of "Secrets of Lost Empires" about the Incas and their bridge building skills. In a reconstruction, local Peruvian Indian women demonstrated they were still adept at the twisting of grass into fine strands. These were plaited to increase their thickness and strength. This plaiting was repeated over and over until ropes sufficient to span a gorge were built up.
At some time, someone may have spotted that the same twisting of animal hair or fur gave a very handy yarn which could then be formed into cloth by one of the many weaving techniques known around the globe. This is where the story starts.
The archaeological record contains a wide variety of "disks", with central holes, and which are of the form necessary to give a "drop spindle" when a shaft is inserted through that hole. The drop spindle is known from times when no record of the spinning wheel exists and is presumed to be the earliest device for producing a continuous thread.
The first set of spindle whorls is from the late Neolithic (Barber 1991b) from Poland and the Ukraine. The "blurb" to Barber's book suggests spinning predates 20,000 BC.
This second set is from the Bronze Age, dug up by Schliemann at Troy (Barber 1991c).
The picture below is of complete drop spindles. The two on the left are from modern Turkey and are believed to have been in use in recent times. The example on the right is a comparable UK craft worker's spindle. Several points of note can be seen in the two right hand ones. The Turkish example has a notch to allow the spinner to control the yarn separately from the bundle of unspun fibre, while the UK example uses a metal hook. The other key feature, which is not commonly appreciated is that the whorl may be at the top as well as the bottom of the spindle. Barber comments (1991e) on a Britsh Museum photograph which shows just such a spindle mistakenly portrayed and wrapped with yarn in an upside-down disposition ! The decorations on the left hand example could easily be dismissed as "for the tourist". However, such spindles have been seen by Reynolds in use in remote places in Turkey and, perhaps more importantly, spindles are valuable tools and so may be prized and decorated, just as so many of the examples from the Bronze Age and even the Neolithic appear to be, in the pictures above.
For those unfamiliar with using a drop spindle, it is a time comsuming process. Not for nothing does the blurb to Barber's book say that "This book corrects the one-sidedness of standard economic histories, which fail, for want of information, to discuss the labor-intensive home production of cloth".
Barber was, at publication, Professor of Linguistics and Archaeology at Occidental College. It is no surprise therefore to find a lengthy interpretation from ancient Greek texts (Barber 1991d) drawn on in the context of "women's work". This is not to say that both boys and men were not involved at different times and different stages, in what is/was a multi-step process, where no one person carried out every step. This applied as much to the Middle Kingdom in Egypt as to Mycenean Greece. Texts, tomb drawings and the like, show both flax and wool to be used and operations right up to the use of weaving frames.
Barber (1991 f) has a photograph of an Egyptian funerary model portraying female textile workers in a variety of poses, including spinners and loom warpers. Thus we can turn to the archaeological record for evidence of weaving. This is predominantly an assemblage of weights for tensioning the warp. Such weights range from roughly circular flat or domed pieces of stone with a central hole, superficially not unlike spindle whorls, through to course mis-shapen lumps with grooves and even dumbell shapes. Perhaps the most characteristic differentiation is a combination of sheer weight, low degree of uniformity and a lack of smoothness.
Below is a sophisticated rendition, by Ian Uzzell [1997], of the type of warp weighted loom used at Butser Ancient Farm. It shows quite clearly the sort of weights found from the Iron Age. They are rather more regular than the earliest versions shown in the succeeding diagram.
The assemblage below, built up from a series of Barber's diagrams [Barber 1991g], shows from left to right, top to bottom, neolithic loom weights from Hungary, an early neolithic example from Bulgaria and a group of Bronze Age weights from Czechoslovakia [as was]. These examples should allow the student to appreciate that, although both spindle weights and loom weights have a hole through the middle, the purpose of any given artefact is usually quite clear-cut, once the method of use is understood. Remember, it is these weights and any cloth fragments remaining that are the predominant archaeological record for spinning and weaving in the past. This precis will not deal with cloth types and their use in interpreting how the particular weaving process was used, since that is a vast topic in its own right.
Finally, we show the transition from the warp weighted loom to a later generation of looms, the Roman two-beam vertical loom, in use in Gaul, Italy and the eastern provinces during the Roman Empire. This design emerged in the UK some centuries later. The top and bottom bars may be fixed or, in more elaborate designs, they may be rollers, which can be adjusted as the weaving of longer cloth progresses and allowing the appropriate tension to be maintained. The diagram was drawn by Simon Chew of the York Archaeological Trust and is given in Walton-Rogers et al [2001].
And so we come full circle, to the time when textile working was widespread in British cottages. In 1750, Daniel Defoe, writing of his travels near Hallifax [modern spelling, Halifax], West Yorkshire [UK] said ....
"We could see that almost at every house there was a tenter and almost on every tenter a piece of cloth .... "
Quoted in Hughes [1975].
Finally, a caution. This synthesis has swept across many spheres, each of which is a field of study in its own right. The intention here has been to draw out those factors which need to be appreciated, studied and understood.
References
Barber, E.J.W., "Prehistoric Textiles", Princeton University Press, 1991 : a 216 et seq : b full attributions are as in Fig 14.7 : c Fig 14.8 : d Chapter 13 : e Fig 2.7 : f Fig 3.6 : g pp 95,98,101
McGavock, Deborah & Lewis, Christine "Feltmaking", The Crowood Press Ltd., 2000
Hughes, Glen "Millstone Grit", Readers Union Book Club 1975, first pub. Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Uzzell, Hazel, "Viking and Saxon Textile Production", Journal for Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, 184 Dec 1997
Walton-Rogers, Jorgensen and Rast-Eicher [editors] "The Roman Textile Industry and its Influence" Oxbow Books 2001
Created 11 March 2002 - Updated 18 March 2002