Textile
Cécile Michel
The word ‘textile’ has a very broad definition and refers to any fibrous construction, whether rope, wickerwork, woven or non-woven textiles such as felt, etc. In this respect, textile craft is one of the oldest technical systems in the history of humanity, going back to the Palaeolithic. The main fibres used in the textile craft are of plant and animal origin. The earliest plant fibres used are flax, cultivated since the eighth millennium BCE, hemp, nettle, and jute; cotton is known from the sixth millennium on. The most common plant fibre in Antiquity is the flax, used to produce fine textiles while hemp, with coarser fibres, was dedicated to sails, ropes and nets. The most common animal fibres are sheep wool and goat hair. Sheep have been domesticated since the ninth millennium BCE, and the fleece of sheep was quickly exploited because of the many qualities of wool fibres: they are flexible and elastic, they are not highly flammable and have good insulating qualities. Goat hairs are coarser and used among others for ropes. In China, the production of silk, a natural protein fibre produced by moth caterpillars, goes back to the Neolithic, and spread into the rest of the world during the first millennium BCE with the opening of the Silk Road (Breniquet et al. 2012). Today, synthetic fibres are also used to weave textiles.
Fabric is created by weaving together two thread systems on a loom, first horizontal, then vertical, warp-weighted; later on was invented the two-beam loom. The warp is parallel to the side of the loom and the weft threads, perpendicular, run alternately over and under the warp threads. Antique textile craft left few traces in the Near and Middle East because of climatic conditions, organic materials rarely survived in this area; the earliest imprints of woven textiles date back to the seventh millennium BCE. By contrast, numerous linen textiles have been discovered in Egyptian tombs, in a very dry environment; as a result, the oldest inscribed textiles come from Egypt.
Linen fibres, made from flax, are more difficult to dye than wool fibres because they absorb the dye product less well. On the other hand, once woven, they are more suitable as a medium for ink (see Garments, Tapestry, and Textile Items).
Relevant analytic methods include:
• C14 for dating
• GC-MS to analyse organic compounds present, such as bitumen in textile from mummies (Ferrant 2021)
• Microscopy for the identification of fibres
• FTIR and chemometric methods for the identification of fibres and the assessment of the degradation (Garside/Wyeth 2006; Margariti 2019; Kavkler et al. 2011; Peets et al. 2017)