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Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean
This pioneering work revises our notions of the origins and early development of textiles in Europe and the Near East. Using innovative linguistic techniques, along with methods from palaeobiology and other fields, it shows that spinning and pattern weaving began far earlier than has been supposed.
Prehistoric Textiles made an unsurpassed leap in the social and cultural understanding of textiles in humankind's early history. Cloth making was an industry that consumed more time and effort, and was more culturally significant to prehistoric cultures, than anyone assumed before the book's publication. The textile industry is in fact older than pottery--and perhaps even older than agriculture and stockbreeding. It probably consumed far more hours of labor per year, in temperate climates, than did pottery and food production put together. And this work was done primarily by women. Up until the Industrial Revolution, and into this century in many peasant societies, women spent every available moment spinning, weaving, and sewing.
The author, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, demonstrates command of an almost unbelievably disparate array of disciplines--from historical linguistics to archaeology and paleobiology, from art history to the practical art of weaving. Her passionate interest in the subject matter leaps out on every page. Barber, a professor of linguistics and archaeology, developed expert sewing and weaving skills as a small girl under her mother's tutelage. One could say she had been born and raised to write this book.
Because modern textiles are almost entirely made by machines, we have difficulty appreciating how time-consuming and important the premodern textile industry was. This book opens our eyes to this crucial area of prehistoric human culture.
Prehistoric Textiles made an unsurpassed leap in the social and cultural understanding of textiles in humankind's early history. Cloth making was an industry that consumed more time and effort, and was more culturally significant to prehistoric cultures, than anyone assumed before the book's publication. The textile industry is in fact older than pottery--and perhaps even older than agriculture and stockbreeding. It probably consumed far more hours of labor per year, in temperate climates, than did pottery and food production put together. And this work was done primarily by women. Up until the Industrial Revolution, and into this century in many peasant societies, women spent every available moment spinning, weaving, and sewing.
The author, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, demonstrates command of an almost unbelievably disparate array of disciplines--from historical linguistics to archaeology and paleobiology, from art history to the practical art of weaving. Her passionate interest in the subject matter leaps out on every page. Barber, a professor of linguistics and archaeology, developed expert sewing and weaving skills as a small girl under her mother's tutelage. One could say she had been born and raised to write this book.
Because modern textiles are almost entirely made by machines, we have difficulty appreciating how time-consuming and important the premodern textile industry was. This book opens our eyes to this crucial area of prehistoric human culture.
508 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
20 people are currently reading
635 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Wayland Barber
10 books102 followersAmerican scholar and expert on archaeology, linguistics, textiles, and folk dance as well as Professor emerita of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College
Barber received her PhD university from Yale in 1968.
Barber received her PhD university from Yale in 1968.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 1, 2023
4.5 stars
March 14, 2021
As I suspected and hoped, this is the more academic—and much better—counterpart to Barber's very popsci
Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years
, which I read last year.
In this one she provides a much more thorough overview of every aspect of historical textile production from 7000 BCE to 500 CE—from the obtaining of fibres from the various sources (flax and other bast fibres, wool, cotton, silk, esparto) over the spinning of thread in various ways to the weaving on various types of looms, plus some ancillary techniques like felting and dyeing—supplementing the archaeological evidence with comparisons to real-world manual cloth production that still takes place, as well as practical experiments on her own part. Perhaps more than anything else, Barber's work is a triumph of experimental archaeology: she realises that hands-on experience producing cloth using ancient methods is vital to understanding those methods, and to recognising the tell-tale traces they leave behind in the cloth so produced, be it in surviving fragments of the actual textile or in the representations of those textiles in other media. A particularly striking example of this, from a footnote to her investigation into whether the famous angular Greek meander originated in cloth and came about from the running spirals of earlier Aegean art because of a change in weaving technique:
Barber only really treats Europe and the ANE, with a particular focus on the Aegean (because that's her area of interest) and Egypt (because the climate preserves textiles better than almost any other place on Earth and they have contemporary depictions of Minoans and Mycenaeans), and the book predates her work with the Tarim basin textiles ( The Mummies of Ürümchi ), but opposite those limitations stand her uncommon ability and lucidity both in communicating the evidence and in interpreting it. There are traces here of the things that bothered me about her other books—chapter 13, Women's Work, clearly served as a template for her 1995 book, and, like that book, briefly cites Gimbutas's more lunatic work; chapter 12, Word Excavation, which examines Greek vocabulary to look for (and arguably find) linguistic evidence of the introduction of new weaving technologies, is conscientious but weirdly uninspired—but they never come anywhere near their level of egregiousness (Aphrodite's girdle remains a girdle, not a string skirt, and the Greek is actually quoted).
All in all, an incredible book whose accessibility belies its groundbreaking work. Well worth the time of anyone who has ever worn clothes.
(Warning: if you get this book off of Amazon they'll send you a shitty print-on-demand facsimile that straight-up does not include the colour plates. The 217 black-and-white pictures and illustrations remain intelligible.)
In this one she provides a much more thorough overview of every aspect of historical textile production from 7000 BCE to 500 CE—from the obtaining of fibres from the various sources (flax and other bast fibres, wool, cotton, silk, esparto) over the spinning of thread in various ways to the weaving on various types of looms, plus some ancillary techniques like felting and dyeing—supplementing the archaeological evidence with comparisons to real-world manual cloth production that still takes place, as well as practical experiments on her own part. Perhaps more than anything else, Barber's work is a triumph of experimental archaeology: she realises that hands-on experience producing cloth using ancient methods is vital to understanding those methods, and to recognising the tell-tale traces they leave behind in the cloth so produced, be it in surviving fragments of the actual textile or in the representations of those textiles in other media. A particularly striking example of this, from a footnote to her investigation into whether the famous angular Greek meander originated in cloth and came about from the running spirals of earlier Aegean art because of a change in weaving technique:
[T]he best technique I could find for making handsome meanders was to weave double-cloth with contrasting light and dark weft. But (because my warp was plain white) I couldn't seem to get rid of a bit of white warp showing at intervals along the edge of the meander. I realized it was a necessary and unavoidable evil of the technique, and relegated the experiment to the reject pile. Then one day, as I was looking at the paint remaining on the korai in the Akropolis Museum, and admiring the well-preserved meander along the border of the chiton worn by Kore no. 594, I noticed that the artist had painted little white ticks all along the edge of the girl's meander, exactly as they appeared in my own weaving. I drew two immediate conclusions: (1) that my guess as to the technique had been correct, and (2) that I had killed once and for all the argument put forward by many art historians that the painters simply made up designs to paint onto statues and vases so they would look pretty, whereas Greek clothing was actually plain. There is no way that an artist "thought up" that imperfection in the weaving: he was looking at real cloth.
Barber only really treats Europe and the ANE, with a particular focus on the Aegean (because that's her area of interest) and Egypt (because the climate preserves textiles better than almost any other place on Earth and they have contemporary depictions of Minoans and Mycenaeans), and the book predates her work with the Tarim basin textiles ( The Mummies of Ürümchi ), but opposite those limitations stand her uncommon ability and lucidity both in communicating the evidence and in interpreting it. There are traces here of the things that bothered me about her other books—chapter 13, Women's Work, clearly served as a template for her 1995 book, and, like that book, briefly cites Gimbutas's more lunatic work; chapter 12, Word Excavation, which examines Greek vocabulary to look for (and arguably find) linguistic evidence of the introduction of new weaving technologies, is conscientious but weirdly uninspired—but they never come anywhere near their level of egregiousness (Aphrodite's girdle remains a girdle, not a string skirt, and the Greek is actually quoted).
All in all, an incredible book whose accessibility belies its groundbreaking work. Well worth the time of anyone who has ever worn clothes.
(Warning: if you get this book off of Amazon they'll send you a shitty print-on-demand facsimile that straight-up does not include the colour plates. The 217 black-and-white pictures and illustrations remain intelligible.)
November 6, 2010
The resource for anyone interested in how textile production developed, as well as modern spinners, weavers - and linguists. Barber shows the economic and cultural impact of textiles through contemporary sources and archaeological finds, and does a brilliant archaeo-linguistic analysis of Greek textile terms that would be of use both to translators and as an example to students of other languages.
The author's dry humour peeks occasionally through the academic discourse, enlivening the text so that the book is not only an impressive reference, but also very readable.
If you happen to be a spinner, you may find even the extensive discussion on spindle whorls fascinating, especially since Barber includes data on spindle weights, which is rarely noted but of practical interest to anyone wishing to test old spinning methods.
The author's dry humour peeks occasionally through the academic discourse, enlivening the text so that the book is not only an impressive reference, but also very readable.
If you happen to be a spinner, you may find even the extensive discussion on spindle whorls fascinating, especially since Barber includes data on spindle weights, which is rarely noted but of practical interest to anyone wishing to test old spinning methods.
March 17, 2010
An exhaustive resource on ancient textiles whose only fault is that even its clear precise writing can't always enliven discussions on different whorl techniques.
September 7, 2024
This book I finished reading a long time ago, probably September 2021, but I just didn’t update. A brilliant book, as are most of EWB’s productions. As noted by others, this is the textbook, read, expanded version of her “Womens’ Work…” volume, the popular book which is currently celebrating an anniversary edition.
It takes a lot longer to absorb due to the depth of detail, but is worth it, and worth the revisit.
What this book topic reminds me of is the story of archaeological acceptance of each new type of evidence in the discovery and documentation of the history and development of human civilization. Pottery, clay cuneiform tablets, papyrus scrolls, all had to endure a period of scepticism and doubt before being added to the list of useful data, in addition to the obvious bones, stones and treasure. Especially the more evanescent types, like fiber. And Ms. Barber is one of the first and best in this aspect of ancient fiber arts discovery and analysis.
It takes a lot longer to absorb due to the depth of detail, but is worth it, and worth the revisit.
What this book topic reminds me of is the story of archaeological acceptance of each new type of evidence in the discovery and documentation of the history and development of human civilization. Pottery, clay cuneiform tablets, papyrus scrolls, all had to endure a period of scepticism and doubt before being added to the list of useful data, in addition to the obvious bones, stones and treasure. Especially the more evanescent types, like fiber. And Ms. Barber is one of the first and best in this aspect of ancient fiber arts discovery and analysis.
March 1, 2022
Review part 1 -- First, this is a great book. Invented the whole science of how to search out the history and anthropology of clothes, including linguistic prehistory. I was especially interested in the chapter on the Minoans (whose frescoes on Crete and Santorini show that they had an absolutely unique style (2800BCE to 1450BCE approx.), unlike any other in the history of costume.
But I wanted to write a quick review for anyone who might be buying this book. I bought the paperback, since I usually prefer to read them. But this is too large a book for the thin paper cover. The hardback doesn't cost much more - get that instead.
But I wanted to write a quick review for anyone who might be buying this book. I bought the paperback, since I usually prefer to read them. But this is too large a book for the thin paper cover. The hardback doesn't cost much more - get that instead.
August 1, 2012
Being a fiber artist I found this book fascinating.
September 11, 2012
Don't wear those clothes again. They don't make it in this crowd.
February 20, 2018
Simply superb.
November 13, 2025
Living inthesemi-tropics I appreciate and prefer natural fibres as 'man-made' non-natural textiles make you sweat. Wayland Barber gives us a fascinating history of the human journey from wearing nothing to creating clothes and textiles. She shows that women have been working away to do this for at least 20,000 years.
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April 23, 2021Yüksek lisans çalışmam için bu kitabı okumam gerekiyor.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews