{"id":31642,"date":"2016-12-28T01:00:30","date_gmt":"2016-12-28T06:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31642"},"modified":"2017-07-09T10:10:43","modified_gmt":"2017-07-09T14:10:43","slug":"qotd-the-importance-of-fabric-as-a-technological-driver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/12\/28\/qotd-the-importance-of-fabric-as-a-technological-driver\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The importance of fabric as a technological driver"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ancient Greeks worshiped Athena as the goddess of techn\u0113<\/em>, the artifice of civilisation. She was the giver and protector of olive trees, of ships and of weaving (without which there would be no sails). When she and Odysseus scheme, they \u2018weave a plan\u2019. To weave is to devise, to invent \u2013 to contrive function and beauty from the simplest of elements. Fabric<\/em> and fabricate<\/em> share a common Latin root, fabrica<\/em>: \u2018something skillfully produced\u2019. Text<\/em> and textile<\/em> are similarly related, from the verb texere<\/em>, to weave. Cloth-making is a creative act, analogous to other creative acts. To spin tales (or yarns) is to exercise imagination. Even more than weaving, spinning mounds of tiny fibres into usable threads turns nothing into something, chaos into order.<\/p>\n

\u2018The spindle was the first wheel,\u2019 explains Elizabeth Barber, professor emerita of linguistics and archeology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, gesturing to demonstrate. \u2018It wasn\u2019t yet load-bearing, but the principle of rotation is there.\u2019 In the 1970s, Barber started noticing footnotes about textiles scattered through the archaeological literature. She thought she\u2019d spend nine months pulling together what was known. Her little project became a decades-long exploration that turned textile archaeology into a full-blown field. Textile production, Barber writes in Prehistoric Textiles<\/em> (1991), \u2018is older than pottery or metallurgy and perhaps even than agriculture and stock-breeding\u2019.<\/p>\n

Of course, pottery and metal artifacts survived the centuries much better than cloth, which is rarely found in more than tiny fragments. That\u2019s one reason we tend to forget how important textiles were in the earliest economic production. We envision an ancient world of hard surfaces much as we imagine the First World War in black and white.<\/p>\n

But before there was gold or silver currency, traders used cloth. In the 20th century BC, the Minoan kingdom on resource-poor Crete swapped wool and linen for the metals that its famed craftsmen, represented by the mythical Daedalus, used to create their wares. In the pre-monetary trade of the ancient Aegean and Anatolia, writes the archaeologist Brendan Burke in From Minos to Midas<\/em> (2010), textile production was of \u2018greater value and importance … than the production of painted clay pots, metal tools, and objects carved from precious metals: everyone depended on cloth\u2019.<\/p>\n

Archaeologists often track fabric production by what is left behind. Huge numbers of spindle whorls (usually of clay) survive, as do the clay loom weights that held vertically hung warp threads in tension. By counting the clay weights left from his workshops\u2019 looms, writes Barber, \u2018we can calculate that King Midas of Gordion could have kept over 100 women busy weaving for him, which makes him more than twice as rich as Homer\u2019s fabulous King Alkinnoos [Alcinous, from the Odyssey<\/em>], who had 50. No wonder the Greeks viewed Midas as synonymous with gold!\u2019<\/p>\n

Virginia Postrel, “Losing the Thread: Older than bronze and as new as nanowires, textiles are technology \u2014 and they have remade our world time and again”, Aeon<\/em><\/a>, 2015-06-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ancient Greeks worshiped Athena as the goddess of techn\u0113, the artifice of civilisation. She was the giver and protector of olive trees, of ships and of weaving (without which there would be no sails). When she and Odysseus scheme, they \u2018weave a plan\u2019. To weave is to devise, to invent \u2013 to contrive function […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1526,7,41,16,15],"tags":[288,1139,618,859,563],"class_list":["post-31642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-greece","category-history","category-quotations","category-science","category-technology","tag-archaeology","tag-bronzeage","tag-clothing","tag-manufacturing","tag-money"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8em","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31643,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31642\/revisions\/31643"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}