Rethinking the Start of Using Textile Fibers

Xiyao Zhang and Xiaoming Yang

Asian Social Science, 2024, vol. 20, issue 5, 45

Abstract: Textile historians tend to demonstrate the history of textiles from the start of using fibers yet rarely explain how people knew to use them. With an investigation of the early textile-related remains and a theoretical analysis of the difficulty in and the demand for using fiber materials, a hypothesis is raised that the know-how of using fibers came from the experience of making textiles with both fineness and strength, which was accumulated from the early technologies of interlacing and cord-making. The properties of fiber materials should have been discovered thanks to the frequent use of stripped or sliced materials taken from plants. Among all the main types of the earliest fiber materials used by humans, invisible plant fibers should have been the first to be used, cotton the second, wool synchronous with or a little later than cotton, and silk the last.

Date: 2024
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