Textile Technologies

Since prehistoric times, textile production has relied upon human ingenuity and has fostered both inquiry and experimentation. It always depends upon several successive processes from the gathering or harvesting of raw materials (plant or animal) to the compacting of fibers to produce felt, or to the preparation of pliable elements (through techniques of retting, hand splitting, or joining fibers; carding, combing, spinning, and/or reeling), to the interlacing of these elements into cloth (weaving and plaiting), to the dyeing of the fibers, threads, or woven cloth and to patternmaking. Sometimes, experimentation has led to ingenious inventions and applications of technologies, contributing significantly to the breadth of human knowledge and development. Such is the case with the development of computers from programmed looms - the Jacquard loom is credited with this invention, which brought on what has been called the

Industrial Revolution. It was created to expedite the interlacing of multiple warps and wefts and used commercially to produce complex woven structures and highly complicated designs and patterns. Its development provided crucial intellectual advances and applications that led to the invention of computers. At the other end of history, the whorled spindle, invented to twist finite elements of plant or animal fiber into a continuous strand, some consider to have served as a prototype for the invention of the wheel.

Textile technologies are dependent upon local materials, human insight, and regional traditions. In the production of textiles, there are clusters of locally specific and diagnostic features, which can be identified. As with other technologies, textile processes are integral with, and inseparable from, the cultural systems within which they emerged.