From: K. WEISS

OLDEST CLOTH

The following is from the July 13th NEW YORK TIMES, page C-1.

In a village near the headwaters of the Tigris River 9,000 years
ago, people descended from hunter-gathers were planting and
harvesting wheat and barley.  They were among the world's first
farmers and over hundreds of years had settled down in houses of
some substance.  At the same time, by adapting their basket-
making technology, they began weaving crude fabrics, which are
the earliest known examples of cloth ever produced.

Archaeologists digging at the site in southern Turkey, a place
known today as Cayonu,have found a fragment of white cloth
wrapped around the handle of a tool made from antler.  The
material, about 1.5 by 3 inches, was preserved because it was
semi-fossilized from contact with calcium in the antler.  It is
probably a piece of linen, woven from the fibers of the flax
plant.

...the cloth has been dated to 7000 BC by radiocarbon testing.
Although clay impressions of textiles of about the same age have
been uncovered before in the region, no other piece of
prehistoric cloth produced earlier than 6000 to 6500 BC has been
found anywhere in the world.

...  In her book PREHISTORIC TEXTILES, (Princeton University
Press, 1991), Dr. Elizabeth J. W. Barber, says .... "The textile
industry, in fact, is older than pottery and perhaps even than
agriculture and stock-breeding, and it probably consumed far more
hours of labor per year, in the temperate climate, than pottery
and food production put together."

... Judging by the weave, Dr. Vogelsang-Eastwood said, the cloth
was produced on a simple frame of four sticks to keep the threads
taut.  The fibers were not spun into fine thread, but twisted
together as in twine.  The vertical threads, called the warp,
were stretched tight on the frame and then the weaver, working by
hand, interlaced tow threads of the weft horizontally around
single warp threads (Note from Karl - they used a method of
twining two weft threads around the warp thread, according to the
pict ure that accompanied the article.) ...plain weaving, lie
that of a handkerchief, does not show up in the archeological
record for another thousand years or more.

The discovery provides new evidence that flax has, indeed, been
domesticated by this time.  Previously, it was thought that some
early lined might have been produced form the wild ancestral
flax, Linum bienne.  But flax seeds found at Cayonu were much
larger than those of the wild plant, more like those of the
domesticated version....

As far as archeologist can tell, the people at Cayonu were
already using cloth for clothing, for bags to carry food, and
perhaps for covering the dead.  Dr. Bogelsang-Eastwood speculated
that the excavated piece might have been used as a rag to get a
better grip on the antler handle.  Dr. Hole, though, said it was
more likely that it was the preserved piece of the cloth bag that
had held the antler.