The first plant bast fibre technology: identifying splicing in archaeological textiles
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The first plant bast fibre technology: identifying splicing in archaeological textiles Margarita Gleba 1 & Susanna Harris 2 Received: 20 July 2017 / Accepted: 26 June 2018 # The Author(s) 2018
Abstract Recent research into plant bast fibre technology points to a Neolithic European tradition of working fibres into threads by splicing, rather than draft spinning. The major issue now is the ability of textile specialists and archaeobotanists to distinguish the technology of splicing from draft-spun fibres. This paper defines the major types of splicing and proposes an explicit method to observe, identify and interpret spliced thread technology. The identification of spliced yarns is evaluated through the examination of textiles from Europe, Egypt and the Near East. Through the application of this method, we propose that the switch from splicing to draft spinning plant fibres occurred much later than previously thought. The ramifications of this shift in plant processing have profound implications for understanding the chaîne opératoire of this ubiquitous and time-consuming technology, which will have to be factored into social and economic reconstructions of the past. Keywords Plant bast fibre . Splicing . Spinning . Technology . SEM . Identification method
Introduction Fibre technologies: from plant to thread Plant bast fibre products, such as linen textiles, have a complex and time-consuming chaîne opératoire. Bast fibres are collected from the phloem (inner bark) surrounding the stem of certain dicotyledonous plants, such as flax, hemp, nettle and lime tree. Before such fibres can be worked into a textile, they have to be extracted, prepared and formed into a thread. The latter process has been generally assumed to be a sequence of operations (retting, bracking, scutching and heckling) in preparation for draft spinning using a spindle, which is a tool usually composed of a rod and a flywheel known as a spindle whorl (see Barber 1991, 41–44 on draft spinning). During the last
* Margarita Gleba [email protected] 1
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3ER, UK
2
School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, 1 University Gardens, Room 206, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
25 years, however, research into a different yarn-making technology has developed based on the Pharaonic Egyptian textile finds—it is known as splicing, a term that in fact subsumes a variety of related techniques (Leuzinger and Rast-Eicher 2011). Although suggested by Fox over 100 years ago (Fox 1910), the idea that in Pharaonic Egypt the threads were made by splicing was only fully accepted relatively recently. Splicing is fundamentally different from draft spinning. In draft spinning, retted (by partially rotting the stems to separate the fibres) and generally well-processed fibres are drawn out from a mass of fluffed up fibres usually arranged on a distaff and twisted continuously using a rotating spindle. In splicing, strips of fibres are joined in individually, often after h
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