As mentioned above, the prevalence and importance of textiles in human cultures is not evident from the archaeological record. Textiles, composed of organic matter, decompose naturally in a comparatively short period of time from exposure to water, air, minerals, insects, and fungi. Where they have survived in archaeological contexts, such natural agents of decay and deterioration are generally absent. This condition is restricted to very dry desert regions, such as Egypt, the Taklamakan Desert in China, and the coastal Central Andes in South America; areas of permafrost, such as Siberia; bogs in northern and central Europe; and other low-oxygen environments such as sealed tombs. In the Eurasian continent, major archaeological textile finds have been located in Egypt, the Caucasus, Siberia, Central Asia, and northwest China. In the Americas, the most numerous and significant finds have been in the desert of the Southwest United States and northern Mexico and along the arid Peruvian coast. Many such finds are associated with burials and often affiliated with lands beyond areas of potential cultivation. The care and rituals with which the human dead are treated, and local ecology in regions not easily adapted for agriculture or grazing, are circumstances which combined together have facilitated longterm preservation and survival of textile specimens.
Archaeological textiles, like other artifacts, reveal the most when their context is fully documented. But textiles pose different sets of issues and problems than those of more durable materials. For adequate retrieval from extreme areas of dryness, processes of rehydration and stabilization have needed to be developed. And the documentation of textiles requires careful analysis of fibers, fiber and yarn preparation, and weave structure, to provide critical data for interpretation and comparative study. Excavated and recorded with care, textiles can provide information about local cultures, particularly when studied within broader cultural contexts, to determine regional patterns and inter-regional contact. The Silk Road, for example, reflects local and long-distance patterns of trade, influence, and movements of populations as well as merchants. Although the term itself is modern, the paths of human interaction and contact it signifies extend back for many centuries if not millennia.
Critical analytical and comparative studies of patterns, designs, colors, materials, weave structures, accessories, and the techniques and processes they imply, can illuminate trade and tribute relationships, routes of migration and pilgrimage, even missionary activity, or relations among nomadic and settled peoples. The flexibility and mobility of textiles have served to render them particularly important as sig-nifiers, if not themselves actual agents, of cultural exchange. As objects of material culture textiles are expressive of human interactions across time and space. Buddhist imagery, for example, was literally carried by itinerant monks from India and Central Asia east through Dunhuang to China, Korea, and Japan, as painted or patterned textiles, easily rolled or folded and transported manually from place to place. Another example is suggested by the presence of cotton, which requires intensive water for its cultivation, and generally relies upon systems of irrigation that need to be maintained for sustained production. Wool, by contrast, is the renewable resource drawn from flocks of sheep and goat, managed through husbandry, which often depends upon migration to find suitable pastures for seasonal grazing, and is therefore associated with groups following patterns of nomadic adaptation. The presence of wool and cotton finds in an archaeological assemblage might signify trade or other relations among nomadic and settled populations; such is the case with Turkmen storage containers of different sizes for various functions (mafrash, torba, and chuval) in which the visible front face is constructed of a wool pile on a wool foundation with small bits of bright white, bleached cotton or bits of brightly colored silk dyed with cochineal (an insect dye, readily available only in certain areas). Like cotton, silk is a textile material associated with settled population groups, who engage in cultivation of mulberry trees, the leaves of which they feed to the silkworms. The cocoon is unreeled to produce the silk filaments, which are often bundled to make a yarn suitable for weaving. In the case of cochineal and other dyestuffs, the presence of a color achieved by a colorant only known from a distant source may indicate patterns of trade. Particular designs or patterns, and styles, may also be indicators of local traditions with wider application.
World History
