I can't remember exactly how this started. But I started watching this video with a friend, about the world's oldest known trousers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl7siWwzibs&t=71s&ab_channel=DeutschesArch%C3%A4ologischesInstitut
I already knew a bit about this, mostly because there was a fair amount of info that came out several years ago. But I love the topic so it's always great to watch and read and learn more.
These are the trousers from the body of a man who was buried in Turfan, in the Tarim Basin, roughly 3000-ish years ago (13th to 10th century BCE). The pants are carefully designed, woven, and constructed, and appear to have been created to be comfortable for someone who rode a horse. Horse-related artifacts are found in the graves in this area, so it's not an unreasonable hypothesis.
I am fascinated by this part of the world, and the textiles are one of the things I'm fascinated by.
The pants are indeed very interesting. They show that the artisans of the time were very skilled in a multitude of techniques.
Most of the cloth is woven in twill, similar to modern blue jeans. The people here were weavers of wool plaid twill, which is also found among the weavers of Hallstatt and other Celtic weavers. Which of course is interesting and the subject of much excitement and speculation from those who get excited and speculative about these sorts of things. These pants have areas with stripes and tapestry-woven-like color patterns.
There are decorative bands near the ankles and knees (or lower legs). They almost look like tablet weaving from a distance, but a closer view shows that they are not. The video says that they are made from a twined technique that is similar to the New Zealand technique of taniko. This is also the same twining technique used for the Native American Columbia Plateau baskets! Not that this is a terribly revolutionary technique, but it is still very cool. In other words, this is not evidence that these groups were all in contact with each other, but rather, that this technique has been independently re-invented many times.
It is always interesting how people take the same ideas and use them in different applications. Even the Columbia Plateau baskets show some of this, with the original baskets made from strips of plant leaves and stems, and modern basket weavers often using commercially spun and manufactured cords and yarn. But here are the exact same techniques used for weaving baskets and also for weaving cloth.
I have no idea why the creators of the Turfan man's pants decided to twine decorative patterns at various points along the warp. Each piece of the pants is thought to have been woven as one piece, so it's not like the decorative band was sewn to the twill; it was made as part of the fabric creation process. I don't know why there are several areas with ornamental embellishments -- do they have a utilitarian purpose? Some other purpose (such as to mark the owner or weaver in some way, or to honor deities or avert the evil eye)? Mostly ornamental because why not?
Here's another paper about the pants, linked from Carol James' blog: https://www.spranglady.com/uploads/7/7/0/8/77084287/17_2014_beck_et_al._qi_348_224-235.pdf
The photos are pretty decent, though not quite as detailed as I would like. The paper also gives schematics should I wish to make my own version of these pants. Assuming they were designed to be worn in real life, and aren't just some kind of funerary clothes or something someone had lying around or something.
Why Carol James? Because there are sprang artifacts, and she is often the expert who is brought in to assist with that. Yes, of course I want to make copies of those artifacts. Which I suppose means that I'll need to learn sprang. And an aside, though a lot of people already know this -- some of the oldest nalbinding artifacts yet discovered have been found in this region, though probably not in this particular grave.
Anyway.
The seams are covered with braids, and there's a drawstring at the waist. Narrow wares! And thus a proper topic for this blog.
The braids are the very common 4-strand braid that I was nattering on about a few months ago. Some use two colors and some only one, I believe, though it's possible the apparent one-colored braid used two dark colors that look similar in the technical paper's photographs and/or that have degraded over the years. The pic below is a two-color braid.
The drawstring is a standard twisted cord. I think the drawstrings have been loosely knotted together with a slip knot but I'm not 100% sure yet. The ends of the drawstrings aren't well preserved, but it kind of looks like one of the better preserved ends was dipped in something to keep it from unraveling. Or maybe there used to be a knot or something and it's now gone, and the ends are kind of goopy from their slow deterioration over the millennia.
An aside -- there's also a paper linked from Carol James' site that talks about the dyes: https://www.spranglady.com/uploads/7/7/0/8/77084287/16_2014_kramell_et_al._qi_348_214-223-2.pdf
This paper analyzed the dyes and found chemicals consistent with madder for the red and indigo for the blue. They concluded that the madder was probably local and the indigo was likely to have been imported since the local area was great for growing madder but more marginal for growing indigo-bearing plants. Dunno, though -- the area had a ton of international trade, but also, it might well have been possible to grow both madder and, say, Japanese indigo locally. The authors found evidence of red, blue, and brown dyes, but no yellow, interestingly enough. I don't know how carefully they looked for it, or if the dye chemicals would have degraded, or if these graves didn't contain yellow textiles, or if the locals had something against yellow and green (green being an overdye of indigo/yellow or vice versa). There was evidence that mordants were used for the dyeing, and the authors felt that these too could be acquired locally.
But back to the drawstrings! Or actually, time to talk about the spinning. Everything seems to be made from singles. Many of the singles were spun S and some were spun Z, though it is possible that some of the photos are reversed. For the drawstring, the braids, and the sewing thread, the artisans used several strands of this single-ply yarn rather than plying them.
The resolution of the photos is not quite good enough for me to see the weaving. Are both warp and weft single-ply yarns? Is there a consistent direction for warp or weft, i.e. are the both spun the same direction, different directions, or random? And so on.
The paper on the dyes gives some spinning and plying info from various textiles they analyzed -- some S-singles, some Z-singles, and some sZ and some zS 2-ply yarns. So, it's not fully consistent. And that implies that there were a lot of spinners around to acquire yarn from, probably. In general, a spinner tends to have a preferred spinning direction, so the presence of S and Z singles implies more than one spinner. Unless maybe there were rules or superstitions about which way to spin and thus it might vary, maybe. I'm also interested in seeing how consistent the yarn thicknesses tend to be.
I haven't even touched on the clothing construction in any serious way since I mostly wanted to write about the braids and drawstrings and the twined decorative panels with a little about the spinning of the threads/yarns that made up the braids and drawstrings.
So all of the above is kind of stupid and unjointed. But I still wanted to get my thoughts down while I remembered them. I've probably forgotten some already, not that this is any great loss to humanity. I need to re-read some of the old Silk Road stuff I have, and maybe go see what new things have been published since I last read about these topics. I might add more references to this post, or, if I am so inspired, write another stupid and unjointed post.
And maybe I need to make some of these pants, or at least the braids. Reminder to myself -- find out more about the braids and tassels briefly mentioned in the paper about dyes. And think a bit more seriously about learning sprang, though maybe I want to explore more new-to-me techniques in braiding and tablet-weaving first.
