Ritual Headwear From the Stone Age

Reconstruction of Mesolithic headdress
(Photo:  Jonathan Cardy, Wikimedia Commons)

One type of clothing that is generally agreed to be important (even by scholars who are not historical costume specialists) is clothing used for ritual, especially religious ritual.

Popular Archaeology, an online archaeology magazine, posted an article last year about the process of reconstructing a type of Stone Age headpiece made from a deer's skull. You can read the article here, and can download the formal research paper from PLOS ONE here.  Though only limited information about the manufacture of these headdresses was gleaned, the result is a tantalizing glimpse into the lives of early humans.

Archaeologists at the University of York have been studying 24 deer-skull headpieces originally found in 1891 at an Early Stone Age site called Star Carr, in Yorkshire, England. These 24 headpieces represent about 90% of the known deer-skull headpieces found in Europe from that time period.

The analysis of the finds revealed physical evidence that the process for creating one of these headdresses must have gone roughly as follows:

1. Damp clay was packed around the parts of the skull that were not to be removed, and the head was placed in a bed of embers.  As the clay cracked and fell off, it was replaced with new clay and the process continued until the unprotected areas of the head were charred.  
2. The skull was hammered lightly around what would be the front of the headpiece to shape the opening, and harder to remove bony sections that weren't desirable for its new purpose.
3. The base of the skull was opened, and the brain removed, cutting the meninges in the process.  (The resulting cut marks are visible on the surviving headdresses.)

The rest of the process could not be perfectly recreated, because it could not be discerned whether or how much of the skin was removed.  In addition, much of the antler had removed from the skulls, and it is not clear when this occurred. At least two possible theories might explain what happened. One is that the unwanted antler had been removed while the headdress was being made, possibly to make it easier to handle during manufacture, or to make it easier to wear.  This theory is viable because Stone Age red deer were larger than modern deer, and it might have been necessary to remove most of the antler to make the headdress wearable.

The other theory is that the extra antler was removed after the headdress had been used and was being discarded, so that the pieces of antler could be used for other things, such as "barbed projectile tips for hunting and fishing."  The cuts found on the headdresses were of such a shape as to indicate that the pieces removed from the headdress could easily have been reused for other objects.  Unfortunately, the analysis could not confirm whether the antler pieces had been removed before or after the headdress was used, and thus it could not be established which theory was correct.

If the latter theory is correct, though, it suggests an attitude about a piece of clothing used for religious ritual that is vastly different from the Christian one of reverence and preservation.  Perhaps Stone Age humans treated religious paraphernalia as disposable, or alterable without any potential sacrilege or consequence, after the god had departed.  That would be evidence of the culture of Stone Age England apart from the headdress itself, and that's what makes it exciting, and potentially useful.  We can only hope for future finds with better evidence of the headpiece creation process. 

Where Does The Needle Point?

World's Oldest Needle.  (Pictures:  Russia 24, Vesti)

From The Siberian Times today comes a dramatic discovery:  a 50,000-year-old bone needle that is 7 cm (about 2 3/4 inches) long, that was recently found in a cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia.

In one way, that fact is not so surprising. Because it has been established that human body lice were already common about 170,000 years ago, and that body lice cannot live on a person who is not wearing clothing, it follows that clothing, and the tools necessary to make it, go at least that far back in time. (To get an idea of where we fit into the story, modern humans, which bear the scientific name Homo sapiens sapiens, go back approximately 200,000 years.)

Illustration showing bracelet find and reconstruction
of its original appearance.  Image credit:
Vera Salnitskaya, Anastasia Abdulmanova

What no one appears to have talked about, before now, is the impact of extinct members of genus Homo or even subspecies of Homo sapiens upon the history of clothing.

The needle was found in a place called the Denisova Cave, which is associated, not with modern man, but with an extinct subspecies called the Denisovans or homo sapiens altai.

In other words, it was not made by the species we think of as ourselves.

Archaeologists have been exploring the Denisova Cave for quite a while now and are far from finished.  The article includes pictures of other finds, made in 2008.  This find included a broken stone bracelet made from a polished, deep green piece of chlorite about 40,000 years ago.  This precisely-shaped band has a round hole neatly drilled in the middle--perhaps for a pendant of some kind on a leather strap.

Nor were the Denisovans necessarily the only Homo genuses in the clothing history picture.  The Siberian Times article calls attention to the fact that the existence of this bracelet demonstrates that the Denisovans were more technologically skilled than the Neanderthals, who were roughly contemporaneous with them.  More importantly, other discoveries from the Denisova Cave include DNA evidence that, at least in Siberia, homo sapiens sapiens interbred with both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.

What is of interest to me are the implications of these needle and jewelry finds on costume history. One implication is that the fashioning of clothing and adornments may predate homo sapiens sapiens. Perhaps more importantly, the presence of these items confirmed that homo sapiens altai shared our need for clothing and our love of adornment--and makes it much harder not to consider these species to be as human as we are.   As the excavations at the Denisova Cave progress, the time is coming when we will need to reevaluate and expand the history of human clothing.

Anna Zariņa's Legacy

From Balticsmith's post on the Facebook group Viking Era Textiles and Fiber Arts, I learned tonight that archaeologist and costume historian Anna Zariņa passed away earlier this year.

I knew that Professor Zariņa was the authority on early Latvian costume, but Balticsmith's post includes a short obituary/biography that underscores the impressiveness of her achievements.  She was born into a farming family.  Her original degrees were in agriculture and home economics, but while she was at university she was exposed to Latvian folk costume and began to study it. Eventually, she learned archaeological field methods and began expanding her research into Latvian prehistory, as far back as the Bronze Age.

In short, if you know anything at all about Latvian costume, chances are you are recalling something Professor Zariņa wrote, or a summary of something Professor Zariņa wrote that was written by someone else.

Balticsmith's post includes a link to a PDF copy of a book by Professor Zariņa whose title means, in English, "Garments in Latvia from the 7th to 17th Centuries." That book can be downloaded from here.  It is written in Latvian, with a German language summary, but it is well-enough illustrated that it should be of use, and of interest, to costume scholars who don't read Latvian (or German).  I am passing the link on in the hope that it will be of use to researchers interested in clothing of the Baltic countries.  Professor Zariņa's legacy is the knowledge she researched and published, and I can think of no better way to honor her than to use and spread that knowledge.

Fuzzy Hose

Yucca utahensis (Photo:  Wikimedia Commons)

From a very good friend, I learned of several similar, fascinating archaeological finds from the New World.  The write-up, complete with excellent  pictures (some of which are zoomable, to show greater detail), can be found on the Arizona State Museum's website, HERE.

The finds were made in Arizona about a century ago and date to about 1100-1300 C.E.  They are from the Anazazi or Pueblo culture. They are a kind of sock made from two fibers; the main weave is an open-mesh cotton, to which animal hair was originally fastened, though little animal hair remains on the surviving socks.  The socks, in turn, were originally twined onto sandal soles, which provided better durability.  The animal hair made the shoe/sock/sandal combination warmer, which matters at night in the desert.  The sandal sole part is made from braided yucca leaves;  Yucca is now, as it must have been then, a plant easily available in and about the American southwestern desert.

According to the Museum's description, the mesh part of the socks was made by a "looping" or "knotless netting" process that sounds a lot like what is called nalbinding with regard to ancient European finds, though to my inexpert eye the pattern of mesh looks rather different from the nalbinding patterns with which I am familiar.  No attempt to identify the type of animal hair used to cover the mesh is made in the museum write-up.  It does not look like any kind of wool, but is fine and fairly short, like the hairs of a dog's coat, which makes me wonder whether it's coyote hair; coyotes are also native to the area.  The result is a very practical piece of footwear for an arid desert environment such as the American southwest.

These finds show that the fact that, even with limited technologies, people can devise, and have devised, items of apparel that are attractive and provide the kind of function required by the climate of the area in which they live.  Although I typically find European costume history more interesting, the ingenuity of these shoe-socks (as the Museum calls them) is impressive and should not be ignored by people interested in the history of clothing.

More Evidence For Neanderthal Clothing?

I've written two posts, one several years ago and one in September, to draw my readers' attention to evidence, provided by analysis of the DNA of human body lice, that the invention of clothing had to have occurred roughly 80,000 to 170,000 years ago, because body lice have been around that long and cannot live on unclothed humans.

Late last week, I found an article in the on-line archaeology magazine Past Horizons, discussing a different kind of evidence that also supports a date of 100,000 years or so for humankind's first clothes wearing.  The Past Horizons article discusses evidence from a site at Abri du Maras, Ardèche, France, which is believed to have been a Neanderthal settlement. The evidence in question is a number of slender, twisted plant fibers found near some stone artifacts.

The fibers are very small--about 0.7 mm in length.  However, these plant fibers were not twisted in their natural state, and merely scraping, boring, or performing other operations on the plants they came from would not, standing alone, resulted in these little twisted fibers. Thus, the researchers reason, they must have been twisted by the Neanderthals themselves, perhaps to make cord or string to use with tools, maybe even with the artifacts found in the same location. 

Of course, it's still a considerable leap from these little fibers to string or thread--which is what you need to create woven textiles.  But the antiquity of the body lice suggests that maybe Neanderthals made the leap from textile-as-tool to textile-for-clothing sooner than scientists concluded in the past.

I consider the Ardèche finds exciting, for finds like them are helping us rewrite and expand the history of how and when clothing was first made.  That is why I am interested in archaeology--since little else is available to aid us in ascertaining the origins of technology, including textile and clothing technology. 

Speaking of Pouches....

Here's another interesting National Geographic article about archaeological evidence for early fashion.

This one is about a Stone Age pouch, excavated at the Profen site in Germany, that is covered with dog's teeth--a hundred of them. Or, rather, the teeth have been deduced to have ornamented the flap of a pouch, because mostly it's the teeth that have survived. A good photograph of the artifact accompanies the article.

Archaeologists are quoted in the article as observing that similar purposeful groupings of teeth have been found in other Stone Age burials, suggesting that teeth were sewn all over special blankets or worn as necklaces. The use of so many teeth on a bag or pouch, however, suggests to me that there was something special about the bag. Perhaps it was used to contain magical paraphernalia, much like the amulet and drug-seed-containing pouches found in some Viking women's graves. That's a hypothesis to keep in mind if other, similar finds surface.

Costume Before Humanity?

Neanderthal man and woman figures from the Neaderthal Museum.

One of the more thought-provoking articles I've read recently is this National Geographic piece speculating about the wearing of clothing by the Neanderthals.

"Le Moustier Neanderthals" by Charles R. Knight (1920)

To the left is a photograph of an exhibit from the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany. That exhibit depicts Neanderthals as wearing drab scraps of hides as clothing--a depiction not too dissimilar from drawings of Neanderthals from the 1920s and earlier.*

The National Geographic article takes the position that this visualization may be a slander on the intelligence and couth of Neanderthal man and woman. It points out that recent archaeological discoveries include human-created items of great antiquity that could well have been parts of clothing. For example, small beads and animal teeth were found in a 28,000-year-old grave in Russia, positioned in such a way that they likely decorated clothing; 12,000-year-old graves in Latvia also contain bead-and-teeth assortments, grouped in different patterns in different graves. Spun flax threads that had been dyed pink, black, and blue that are over 30,000 years old have been found by archaeologists in the country of Georgia.

More intriguing, and to me at least more convincing, support for the antiquity of clothing is the genetic evidence from lice. Lice that live on humans, called body lice or clothing lice, cannot live on human heads or on furred animals, because they have adapted to lay their eggs only on human clothing--not on fur or hair.  A study done at the University of Florida has ascertained when the lice species that live on human heads and human body lice diverged from each other, and the answer turns out to be between 83,000 and 170,000 years ago. In other words, the genetic code of the body louse confirms that our distant ancestors, of whatever species, had to have been wearing clothing of some type or other more than 150,000 years ago--long enough ago that they may have feasted on Neanderthals as well as on homo sapiens sapiens.**

Finally, stone tools in shapes usable to scrape and preserve animal hides are even older than the lice divergence--about 300,000 years old, going back to the time of homo neanderthalensis.*** The article observes that Neanderthals who lived in climates made hostile by periods of glaciation would have had to wear substantial clothing simply to survive. Thus, even if string and cloth turn out to be more recent inventions, Neanderthals could have been making leather clothing for thousands of years before any clothing artifacts that have managed to survive to the present day could have been made. 

We may never have sufficient information to confirm, let alone reconstruct in more than a speculative way, what clothing homo neanderthalensis may have worn. But the possibility that the Neanderthals wore clothing that required significant skill to make, clothing that they cared about adorning, brings them closer to us. It forces us to open up our definition of what belongs in the category "human", and by doing so begins a process of rewriting human history. It's easy to decry clothing as of little importance and fashion as a frivolity, but the truth is that clothing is one of the major inventions that has shaped our human way of life and distanced us from other animals.

Certainly the body louse would agree.

*    Photographs shown with this post are from Wikimedia Commons.

**   Readers with a sufficient science background may wish to read the study report.  An abstract of the report and a free download link to a copy of the full report may be found here.

*** There is some disagreement as to whether Neanderthals were a different species from ourselves, or a subspecies. If they are considered a subspecies, they properly should be called homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Assuming that the Neanderthal Museum's figures correctly depict what average Neanderthal individuals looked like, I would be reluctant to argue against the proposition that the Neanderthals are part of our species, but I know little enough about the science involved to be willing to argue that the Neanderthals are, in fact, part of our species.

The Oldest Textile Find

The arts of making plant fibers into thread and then weaving the thread into cloth are very old. How old?

According to this article in Current World Archaeology, archaeologists found "numerous short lengths" of spun flax thread in the soil inside a cave in the Republic of Georgia. These threads are estimated to be over 34,000 years old.

According to the article, some of the threads found in the Georgian cave are twisted in a manner that suggests that they had been used for sewing, while still other threads had been dyed, though the article does not specify how this fact was determined by the archaeologists or what dyestuffs might have been used. But the discovering archaeologists believe that these threads may be evidence for cloth manufacture, not simply a collection of threads that were used to fasten materials together.   Possibly the making of cloth goes back even longer than was previously thought.

Another recent Current World Archaeology article discusses other recent costume-related finds, including the world's oldest shoe and the world's oldest jewelry. I commend it to your attention as well.

P.S. Science Magazine has published a short article by the archaeologists who were responsible for the thread find. Their article may be read on line or downloaded in PDF form by following the link on this page. Doing so is free, but Science Magazine's website requires non-subscribers to register for a free account first.  If you register, and follow the link to the article, you will find comments by other scientists disputing the archaeologists' identification of the fibers they found as flax.  Nothing is said in these comments about the archaeologists' other suggestions as to the potential use of these fibers.

Where It All Began?

The BBC recently reported on an archaeological paper showing butchered ravens and crows in association with Neanderthal remains. Since there isn't any meat to speak of on those kinds of birds, the authors believe that Neanderthals must have used the birds' black feathers as body decoration. The archaeological article itself can be read and/or downloaded here.

Perhaps this kind of feather use is the ultimate mother of all human costuming? I shall keep an eye out for further research along these lines.

Oldest Surviving Shoe?

Someone on one of the costume-related mailing lists I frequent passed along this link to a BBC article about a recent archaeological find in Armenia. (Thanks go to Melisende Fitzwalter from the Yahoo Authentic SCA list.)

The find is of a complete, and relatively sound, leather shoe. It is estimated to be about 5,500 years old. It is formed from a single, shaped piece of leather, and stitched closed down the middle of the instep. The article contains a very good picture of the find, which I commend to my readers' attention.

Interestingly, it would have fit me. The shoe is estimated to be a European size 38, which corresponds to UK size 5 or a woman's size 7 in the U.S., and that is the size I wear. Since there was no body associated with the find, there are no clues as to whether this particular shoe was worn by a man or a woman, or whether the grass with which it was stuffed was worn with the shoe or would have been removed for wearing. 

It it sobering to realize that this ancient shoe would have fit right in with the types of shoes worn in Europe in the Middle Ages, approximately 4,500 years later, and would not be that conspicuous today.

EDIT:   The amazing pearl has located the scholarly article describing this find, and thoughtfully provided a link to same on her blog. The article may be found here. Thanks, pearl!

SECOND EDIT:  The abstract from the scholarly article indicates that the shoe is a European size 37, not 38.  That makes it a bit small for me. :-)

THIRD EDIT:  The scholarly article points out that this shoe is the oldest found in Eurasia, but that older shoes have been discovered in Missouri.  Thus, I have reinstated the question mark in the title to this post.