Dressing a Neolithic Urban Population with Stone Age Fabric
One of the more famous archaeological sites in Turkey is Catalhöyük, a Stone Age city. We don’t think of Neolithic cities somehow, but about 10,000 people lived there around 9,000 years ago. For a long time after its excavation in the ’50s, this site held the honor of “oldest city.” Back in the ’60s, archaeologists at Catalhöyük excavated a fragment of Stone Age fabric. A long debate ensued as to what kind of fiber it was, wool or linen. Analysis at the time leaned to linen, although the absence of flax seeds at the site meant imported linen. Are you envisioning Neolithic linen sheath dresses?
Linen or Wool? Looking for a Creative Insult?
Even jumping forward a few millennia to the Bronze Age in Turkey (about 1270 BCE), Scholars still debate whether wool or linen was more commonly used and by whom. The relative status of the two fibers is unclear. One of my favorite ancient hints on the subject is an insulting reference to the Kaskans as “linen-weavers.” The Kaskans (Paskans in my fiction) were the perennial enemy of the Hittites. They lived at the upper northern edge of the Hittite Empire. Why “linen-weaver” is insulting is not at all clear, and the reference may be totally a misunderstanding on our part.
Tapestry Weaving
When I wrote my first novel, Hand of Fire, I researched Bronze Age Greek fabrics and weaving techniques for my main character, Briseis. Briseis, a princess from a city near Troy, would have worked on a warp-weighted loom in wool or linen. The Greek vase in the photo at the top shows 6th century BCE Greek women using this type of loom (photo by E. S. V. Leigh, wiki). Such a loom leaned against a wall with loom weights (stone or ceramic) holding the warp taut. I chose to have Briseis weave with both fibers, although the tapestry that plays an important role in the romance within the novel is made of wool. Briseis used wool dyed a wide variety of colors because she depicted her medicinal herbs on her tapestry.
New Samples of Stone Age Fabric
Apparently, during the renewed excavations at Catalhöyük, archaeologists found several more Stone Age fabric fragments. So they called upon the expertise of Lise Bender Jørgensen and Antoinette Rast-Eicher, specialists in archaeological textiles. They analyzed both the original 1960’s find and some of the recent ones. They have a definitive answer. Neither wool or linen.
Shear that Oak?
It turns out Neolithic weavers used a fiber they found nearby in abundance. Every time someone chopped down an oak tree to build a house or an animal pen, they’d strip the fibrous material out from underneath the bark. These earliest examples of woven textile are made with bast fibers. “Bast fibers were used for thousands of years to make rope, thread, and in turn also yarn and cloth,” says Bender Jørgensen. I didn’t know that. How interesting. I’m inviting my textile producing friends to give this a try and report back.
Here for a post about a fragment of textile found in Israel dating to 1000 BCE that was dyed with rare purple.