Fibres, textiles, dyes and cordage

An Indian painting shows a man seated on the ground weaving on a loom made of branches, and a woman spinning at a spinning wheel. — Spinners and weavers at work, seated on the ground with looms made of simple branches: painting by Kehar Singh, Punjab (India), around 1860. Kehar Singh, CC0, source

Asked to name an important invention, people probably think of the wheel, fire or printing.

Few answer: string. Yet it is one of the most decisive, and one of the oldest.

The age of string

All it takes is to pick up short, fragile plant fibres and twist them together to obtain a long, supple, tough thread, far stronger than each of the fibres taken separately.

With thread, you make ties, bags, fishing nets, traps, ropes, and finally clothes. Without thread, almost none of this exists.

The archaeologist Elizabeth Wayland Barber has proposed calling this moment the String Revolution — and suggested that the Stone Age would have been better called the String Age.¹

Her argument is stronger than it seems:

So powerful, in fact, is simple string in taming the world to human will and ingenuity that I suspect it to be the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth, that enabled us to move out into every econiche on the globe.²

The unseen weapon: not the flint point, not fire, but thread, which makes it possible to tie, to carry, to trap, to bind.

Why is it never mentioned? Because thread rots.

Stone survives a hundred thousand years. A fabric disappears in a few centuries. Almost everything that has been spun and woven in human history has disappeared without a trace. What survives comes from exceptional places: very dry deserts, peat bogs, frozen ground, or objects sealed inside a monument.³

This history escapes us because the materials themselves have not survived. Not having left a trace is not the same thing as not having existed.

Different fibres everywhere

Each region spun what its environment provided.

Flax: the Mediterranean and the Near East.
Wool: sheep in Western Asia and Europe.
Silk: East Asia (reeling the cocoon of the mulberry silkworm).
Camelids (llama, alpaca, vicuña): the Andes (the vicuña providing one of the finest fibres in the world).
Cotton: South Asia and the Americas.
Agave: Mesoamerica.
Raffia: Central Africa.

Several species of cotton were cultivated separately on different continents by populations with no contact between them. In northern Peru, cotton has been cultivated for at least 7,800 years.⁴

In Oceania, cloth is made differently: the bark of certain trees is beaten until it yields a supple, wide material (tapa), without thread or weaving.

Spinning, then weaving

Spinning requires a simple and effective tool: a small stick, the spindle, weighted with a little disc pierced through its centre, the spindle whorl. The disc gives the spindle its rotational momentum to twist the fibre evenly.⁵

These spindle whorls of fired clay or stone are found by the thousand on archaeological sites; they are often the only remains of a vanished textile industry.

Weaving means stretching a series of parallel threads — the warp — and passing another thread across them — the weft. The tool that holds the warp is called a loom, and it comes in several forms:

Vertical looms: the threads hang down, tensioned by clay weights (loom weights) found in excavations.
Belt looms (backstrap): very widespread in Asia and the Americas, they are attached between a fixed point and the body of the weaver, who controls the tension. Light and portable, this tool imposes a physical constraint: the width of the cloth does not exceed the reach of the arms (generally 75 cm at most).⁶

Making rope, and why it changes everything

Weaving is not the only use of thread. Twisting together several threads that have already been twisted gives a rope, and rope is probably the oldest and most consequential application.

The principle comes down to a reversed twist: the strands are twisted in one direction, then assembled by twisting in the other. Each then tries to untwist, which presses them against one another. A rope does not hold because it has been knotted: it holds because its strands are fighting one another. That is what allows it to be much stronger than the sum of its fibres, and not to come apart under tension.⁷

Without rope, almost nothing works. No bow, no harpoon bound to its shaft, no trap, no fishing net, no load carried on the back, no sail or rigging — and therefore no navigation. You can make a stone tool without thread; you cannot haft it without a binding.

The materials used are not those of clothing: flax and hemp of course, but above all fibres too rough for the skin — bark, lianas, palm leaves, animal sinew, horsehair. A rope does not need to be soft: it simply must not break.

That is why these objects have almost entirely disappeared from the archaeological record: plant fibres rot. The existence of ropes is deduced from what they made possible — a notched handle, a drilled hole, a stone that only makes sense when tied.

Two recent discoveries have nevertheless provided direct evidence, and they are older than anyone imagined.

In a rock shelter in the south of France, a fragment of cord remained stuck beneath a flake of flint. It measures six millimetres long and half a millimetre wide. Under the microscope, three bundles of fibres twisted in one direction, then assembled by twisting in the other can be made out — exactly the principle described above. It was made by Neanderthals.⁸

What this half-centimetre of string tells us

The fibres come from the inner bark of a tree, probably a conifer. This is where the detail becomes interesting.⁹

This fibrous layer does not come away equally easily all year round. It separates much more easily in early spring, when the sap rises. Then the fibres grow larger and thicker as the tree grows.¹⁰

Making this cord therefore required knowing at what time of year to go and gather the material. Not just a technique, but a calendar.

The authors go further, and their argument deserves to be read by anyone who has followed this domain from the beginning. Twisting fibres, they write, implies a multi-component technology — and an understanding of pairs, sets and numbers.¹¹

In other words: to make a three-strand rope, you have to count to three, and know that three things form a set. Thread and number go together.

A cave in Germany has also yielded a baton of mammoth ivory pierced with holes bearing spiral grooves, about thirty-five thousand years old.¹²

Archaeologists made a replica of it and tried it out. With four people — three twisting the fibres, one assembling them in the opposite direction — they produced five metres of strong rope in ten minutes. So the object was not a mysterious ornament: it was a tool, and it required several people working together.¹³

Colour

Fixing a colour permanently on a fibre is a matter of applied chemistry, developed long before this science was formalised.

Indigo (Blue)

The blue pigment comes from plants containing indican (indigo plant, woad). The plant does not directly contain the blue colour: the leaves have to be fermented, the active principle dissolved, the cloth dipped, then exposed to the air. It is oxidation on contact with oxygen that reveals the blue hue.

At Huaca Prieta (northern Peru), fragments of woven cotton dated to about 6,000 years ago bear blue traces of indigo (chemical analysis, 2016). This is the oldest known use in the world, predating the Egyptian specimens by 1,500 years.¹⁴

Murex (Purple / Violet)

Extracted from the hypobranchial gland of sea molluscs (Murex), Tyrian purple required thousands of shells for a few grams of dye. The process also relies on a photochemical transformation in air and sunlight.

Cochineal (Red)

In Mesoamerica, the carmine pigment is produced from cochineal (Dactylopius coccus), a parasite of Opuntia cacti. Astonished by the intensity of this red, the Spanish organised a commercial monopoly on it from the sixteenth century. In the fleet of the Indies, cochineal was the most valuable cargo after gold and silver.

When cloth is worth more than gold

In the Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu), the supreme value lay not in precious metals but in fine cloth, cumbi (or kumpi).

Political and social use: It served as an attribute of power, as a reward for distinguished warriors and as a diplomatic gift.
Ritual: Pieces of cumbi, representing hundreds of hours of specialised work, were burned as religious offerings.
Tax and labour: The Inca state supplied raw materials (wool, cotton) to subject populations, who had to return fixed lengths of cloth (textile mit’a).¹⁵

At first contact, the Incas offered high-value textiles to the conquistadors, who saw them as mere fabrics, of secondary importance compared with gold.

Economic dimorphism and forced labour

The industrial history of textiles is inseparable from the organisation of forced labour on a global scale.

Slavery and cotton: Before industrialisation, cotton was processed locally. The advent of British mechanised spinning mills in the nineteenth century created a massive demand for raw material. This expansion relied on the forced labour of enslaved people in the American South (about 2 million people in 1830).
Mechanisation and craft: The massive export of British machine-made cloth to India in the nineteenth century disrupted local craft structures. Indian weavers adapted in part by using imported industrial yarn, thus changing their modes of production.¹⁶

Summary of textile fibres

Fibre	Origin	Main region
Flax	Flax stem (Linum usitatissimum)	Mediterranean basin, Near East
Wool	Fleece of sheep	Western Asia, Europe
Silk	Silkworm cocoon (Bombyx mori)	East Asia
Cotton	Seed fibres (Gossypium)	South Asia, the Americas
Alpaca / Vicuña	Fleece of camelids	Andes
Agave	Leaf fibres (Sisal, Henequen)	Mesoamerica
Raffia	Leaflets of Raphia palms	Central Africa
Beaten bark	Tree bast (Tapa)	Oceania

Note 1

We could call it the String Revolution.

Barber, Elizabeth J. W., Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times, W. W. Norton, New York, 1994