THE 20TH-CENTURY REVOLUTION IN TEXTILE MACHINES AND PROCESSES. PART 1: SPINNING AND WEAVING

Abstract

This paper reviews the textile revolution of the mid-20th century, a subject little studied by archaeologists, unlike the developments of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The consequences of this revolution pose new challenges to the industrial archaeologist, since the legacy is not distinctive buildings and urban landscape, but the machinery and fabrics themselves. This is the first instalment of a two-part study, looking at the development of the spinning and weaving in the period 1950–85.     

Characterization of dyes in ancient textiles from Yingpan,Xinjiang

In this paper we analyzed the natural dyes in well-preserved, ancient textiles from Yingpan, an important archaeological site on the Silk Road, using high-performance liquid chromatography with diode array and mass spectrometric detection. Dyes were removed from textile fibers using a soft extraction method (pyridine, water and oxalic acid). Two species of madder-type plants, Rubia tinctorum and Rubia cordifolia were identified as the dye sources in red and brown samples. We also were able to detect unusual flavonoid glycosides in yellow and green woolen yarns, although we have not been able to pinpoint with certainty a specific plant that may have been used to produce this dye(s). On the other hand, we found that yellow and green silk threads had been colored with protoberberine-type dyes, probably obtained from species of cork tree, Phellodendron spp., and/or other protoberberine producing plant. We propose that the textile dyes found at Yingpan reflect a merging of Eastern and Western practices and technologies during the 800-year period (206 BCE–618 CE) encompassing the early years of the Silk Road.     

THE USE OF IMAGE ANALYSIS TO DETERMINE YARN TWIST LEVEL IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL TEXTILES

An analysis of the structure of archaeological textiles can give an insight into different traditions, geographic origins or technologies associated with the textile production. An important parameter in this context is the level and direction of yarn twist. In this paper a new quantitative method of yarn twist measurement is described. Using image analysis techniques a measure of the mean twist level and the variation in twist can be determined. The technique is applied to a selection of woven woollen textiles from the first-century Roman fort at Vindolanda in northern England.     

Radiocarbon Dates on Textile and Bark Samples from the Central Grave of the Adena Mound (33RO1), Chillicothe,Ohio

The Adena Mound (33RO1) is the type site of the Adena culture, yet there have been no radiocarbon dates to place it reliably within a temporal framework. Fortunately, the artifact collection, curated by the Ohio Historical Society, includes objects that are highly suitable for radiocarbon dating, including fragments of textiles and tree bark associated with the central burial. We selected a textile fragment and two bark fragments for radiocarbon dating. The textile exhibits alternate pair twine with very fine yarns probably composed of cellulose bast fibers. The bark is from a black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) tree. The results of the radiocarbon dating indicate that the Adena Mound was constructed between the end of the second century B.C. and the beginning of the first century A.D., placing it near the midpoint in the sequence of radiocarbon-dated Adena culture sites. This study demonstrates the value of museum collections for gleaning new data from curated materials.     

Māori Textiles from Puketoi Station,Otago, New Zealand

Abstract

A group of Māori textile artefacts were discovered in a rock shelter in the southern South Island of New Zealand in 1895. The assemblage comprised a significant number of textile and textile-related artefacts including large and small bags, footwear and prepared leaf and fibre for textile production. The artefacts were privately owned until the 1920s when they were acquired by the Otago Museum, remaining there until new techniques made further investigation possible. This paper presents information from an interdisciplinary investigation of the Puketoi Station assemblage of textile artefacts, which examined artefact structure, form and function, and materials of construction. Interpretation of these artefacts using contemporary textile analysis methods, traditional weaving knowledge, and recent archaeological research, turns them from static objects into dynamic components of culture. The Puketoi Station artefacts embody and illustrate a unique material culture associated with the late prehistoric southern New Zealand Māori lifestyle.     

Coloration and Fabric Structure of Selected Polychrome Textiles from the Seip Mound Group

Abstract

Selected yellow and brown colored textiles from the Hopewellian Seip Mound group were examined visually and photographed. In some cases, the yarns are colorant saturated and the colored patterns are nearly identical on both sides of the textiles. In addition to the use of several colors, fringe and possibly leather are used as decorations. Particulate material shed from these fabrics, or small samples strategically removed based on the results of the forensic photography, were examined with optical microscopy, revealing that the fabrics are made of dyed rabbit hair and bast fibers. Energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) of a subset of the samples indicates that there is no significant difference in elemental composition between the different colors. However, the high carbon and copper content are signs of mineralization of the fibers. These textiles reflect multifaceted textile construction methods with elaborate decoration techniques as well as the use of complex dye technology.     

Environing technologies: a theory of making environment

ABSTRACT

The central proposal of this article is that environing technologies shape and structure the way in which nature becomes environment, and as such used, perceived and understood. The argument builds on the understanding that environment is the result of human intervention. Technology is here understood broadly as a terraforming practise, materially and conceptually. We suggest that the compound environing technologies enable us to see environmental change on multiple scales and in new registers. That technologies alter the physical world is not new; our contribution focuses on the conceptual, epistemological, economic and emotional appreciation of systems and aggregates of technologies that is part and parcel of material change. The environing technologies that enable such articulation and comprehension hold potential in the future transformation that our societies need to undergo to overcome the crisis of environment and climate.     

Probable Fibres from Hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) in Bronze Age Scotland

Abstract

Diameter measurements of bast fibres from cloth and string with a hoard of bronze age metalwork found in St Andrews, were different from those of flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) but comparable with those of hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) leading to the suggestion that hemp was used as a textile fibre in Britain much earlier than has been thought.     

Technology and crisis: The great depression of the middle ages and the technology of the renaissance (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries)

An extremely violent crisis hit Western Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages: population, prices and agricultural production declined; the stretch of cultivated land shrank when, simultaneously, wars and internal troubles shook up the new states. While the technological level remained stagnant in agriculture as well as in the textile and building industries, it progressed remarkably in other sectors, particularly those of mining and metallurgy. The interpretation of these facts is a delicate matter; however, it is possible to throw light on the lack of interest for agricultural stock, on the states’ need of metal required for both money and the ongoing wars, and finally, on the investment possibilities of the holders of new technologies.     

Marling & Evans,King's Stanley and Ebley Mills,Gloucestershire

Abstract

The economic causes of European emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century enjoy an established historiography, which considers many aspects of the pre-industrial economy from agriculture to the collapse of traditional industries. This paper examines the link between pre-industrial home textile manufacture and emigration from the German south-west. It draws on data from communities and households in the state of Württemberg, and finds that pre-industrial textile production was not a major determinant of migration patterns in the nineteenth century; instead, the localised rise and fall of textile work was influenced by the availability of emigration pathways, an inversion of results seen elsewhere.     

THREE AND A HALF CENTURIES OF BOTTLE MANUFACTURE

Abstract

This paper looks at the development of the bottle glass industry in England. The production of bottles is considered from both a typological perspective and through the chemical composition of the glass used. Samples of bottles and bottle production debris from many different production sites have been analysed to determine their chemical composition. The changes in the social organisation of the industry are discussed in relation to the changing materials and technologies employed in bottle production.     

Re‐writing the ‘book of blots’: Critical reflections on histories of technological ‘failure’

Abstract

Although an interest in technological ‘failure’ has become prominent in recent history of technology, historians have not always clearly articulated the presuppositions of attributing ‘failure’ to technology. This paper undertakes a critical examination of two main historiographies of ‘failure’: ‘failure’ as categorization of ‘pathological’ technologies that clearly demarcates them from ‘successes’, and ‘failure’ as a mundane and inevitable prerequisite of subsequent ‘success’. To reconcile these divergent analyses, this paper argues that historians should not treat ‘failure’ as residing in the technology itself. It is rather a matter of imputation according to socially‐embedded criteria of what constitutes success and failure. Accordingly judgements of ‘failure’ are prone to interpretive flexibility in a manner that is not necessarily settled by any process of ‘closure.’ I will argue that any ‘failure’ of technologies should be located in the socio‐technical relations of usage, especially in the expectations, skills and resources of human users. The moral irony of attributing responsibility for ‘failure’ to technologies themselves rather than to humans users will thereby be highlighted.     

‘We are not a rich country to waste our resources on expensive toys’: Mexico’s version of Atoms for Peace

Abstract

The Atoms for Peace initiative was announced by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 8 December 1953. The ways in which Eisenhower’s proposal was interpreted, adapted and reshaped by different countries allows us to understand the various meanings and uses of nuclear technologies, particularly in Third World countries. Mexico’s version of the initiative was related to its modernizing nationalism, a distaste for overt geopolitical alignment and nuclear weapons, and an intermittent commitment of the federal government with nuclear technologies. These ingredients eventually led to the promotion of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, known as the Treaty of Tlatelolco (TT) signed in Mexico City in 1967. The TT made Latin America the first nuclear weapons-free populated region in the world, thus positioning Mexico in the new geopolitical nuclear order through a denuclearization discourse and a policy of non-engagement with nuclear technologies.     

AN EXPLORATION OF PREHISTORIC SPINNING TECHNOLOGY: SPINNING EFFICIENCY AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSITION*

Thigh‐spinning and spindle‐spinning, methods for making yarn and string, have been used through the millennia to produce substantial quantities of yarn for textiles. Productivity data were gathered in a replication study of thigh‐spun and spindle‐spun yarns and were recompiled from the literature. Calculated production rates allow comparison of the spinning methods. Factors influencing production rate include intrinsic fibre properties, fibre preparation and particular details of spinning technique, as well as the experience and motivation of the spinner. The role of efficiency in technology transition between thigh‐spinning and spindle‐spinning is discussed.     

From Kings to Kids: Refashioning Akan Adinkra Symbols as ‘African’ Motifs in a Nineteenth-Century British Cloth Design

In the nineteenth century, British textile companies began making factory-printed cloth with adinkra motifs for African consumers. These symbolic designs were previously reserved for hand-stamped cloths among Akans of present-day Ghana. Such textiles illustrate the complexities of re-presenting history and shaping cultural knowledge through cloth and colonial exchanges. This article focuses on the design and circulation of one specific British textile design with adinkra symbols made during the 1890s to 1930s, the earliest recorded evidence I have found of adinkra in factory-printed cloths. This textile pattern reveals how merchants, designers and printers historically transformed adinkra symbols from Akan society to become global markers of Africa.     

Marketing Fabrics and Femininity in Interwar France

Abstract

This article examines discourse about the gender of garments and dress fabrics in the French fashion media, using Roland Barthes's 'informal semiotics' of modern consumption, and particularly his notion of the fashion magazine as a 'machine' articulating the meaning of fashion, including the gender implications of fashion and fabrics. The article also tracks the response of French couturiers and textile manufacturers to anxieties about gender ambiguities in ladieswear between the two world wars. The first part analyzes coverage of chemise dresses and ladies' suits in 13 illustrated magazines: four fashion magazines, three fashion supplements, three trade magazines and three society magazines. The second part of the article explores the attitudes of textile manufacturers' associations, of prominent woollen and silk producers, and of their marketing campaigns, to more androgynous styles using the same sources, professional bulletins, and the minutes of the Silk Manufacturers Syndicate (Chambre Syndicale des Fabricants de Soieries).     

Guerrilla healthcare innovation: creative resilience in Zimbabwe’s chimurenga, 1971–1980

Abstract

Drawing from the last five years of chimurenga, Zimbabwe’s war of self-liberation from the early 1960s to 1980s, this paper shows that the most important aspect of technology and innovation in Africa is not the technology and innovation itself, but the African spirit of creative resilience born of the specificities of struggles its people have endured. By creative resilience is meant a phenomenon whereby, even where death is the outcome, and where the situation is insurmountable, people do not just surrender to fate, but die fighting. As a site of creative resilience, chimurenga is the ultimate site of creative labor and a vast laboratory, not simply a destination for incoming technologies, or a 'user' space but generative of its own insurgent and counter-insurgent innovations. Focusing on the communal war effort involving guerrillas and ordinary Africans in the rear bases of Mozambique and Zambia and on the front inside Zimbabwe, the paper makes its argument through a focus on healthcare innovation.     

An Analysis of Textile Fragments from the Janey B. Goode Site

Abstract

Excavations at the Janey B.Goode site (11S1232), located in the American Bottom region of Illinois, yielded carbonized textile remains from two pit features dating to the Terminal Late Woodland period and from one pit feature dating to the Mississippian period. The remains comprise both twisted or braided cordage pieces and actual twined textile fragments ranging in size from 2×3 cm to over 9×9 cm. Four different twining techniques are represented: two types of compact twining and two types of space twining. All textiles appear to be constructed of bast fibers, probably from the outer part of herbaceous plant stems. The textiles are similar to those described from other Midwestern sites dating to the Woodland and Mississippian periods, reflecting the existence of a widespread fiber industry. In this paper, the textiles from the Janey B. Goode site and the production technology used to produce them are described.     

FTIR imaging and HPLC reveal ancient painting and dyeing techniques of molluskan purple

Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and imaging coupled to optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy coupled to energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled to diode-array detection are used to investigate two samples removed from a painted decoration of a burial kline and a textile fragment, both found in Koru tumulus (fifth century BCE) in Daskyleion. Tyrian purple and kaolinite were identified in both samples, thus suggesting that the aluminosilicate compound had an important role in the applied painting and dyeing processes. The textile fragment is composed of undyed cotton and silk yarns dyed with the molluskan dye. The relative compositions of the molluskan materials used in the two archaeological objects are similar and comparable with the corresponding composition measured for a purple sample originated from Murex trunculus mollusks according to the HPLC results. This result is supported by principal component analysis (PCA) which, furthermore, takes into account the relative compositions of the extracts of the three Mediterranean mollusks, published in previous reports.     

Mazamet and the Skin Wool Trade 1850–1913

Abstract

In 1955, northern Nigerian government officials, working together with the British textile firm, David Whitehead &; Sons, successfully began arrangements to build the first large textile manufacturing mill in Nigeria, Kaduna Textiles Ltd (KTL), which began production in 1957. In the following decade, several textile mills opened in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, including Arewa Textiles, United Nigerian Textiles Ltd (UNTL) and Nortex among others. Textile production, spinning and dyeing operations expanded in Kaduna during the oil boom years of the 1970s. Yet by 1997, KTL, Arewa Textiles and UNTL were barely functioning, operating with obsolete equipment, without capital to obtain spare parts and without a regular source of electricity. By 2007, all three mills had closed. In this paper, we examine the growth and the reasons for the subsequent decline of textile manufacturing in Kaduna. We argue that the industry’s decline reflected both internal problems — such as frequent changes in political leadership, which contributed to abrupt shifts in industrial policy and a failure to maintain power infrastructure — and external factors — such as the implementation of a structural adjustment programme in 1986 that deregulated the currency and made imports of spare parts and modern weaving equipment prohibitively expensive. In addition, changes in international textile trade agreements and the liberalisation of Nigerian-Chinese trade after 2010 have undermined present efforts at revitalising local textile manufacturing. The paper concludes with an assessment of efforts in the first decade of the twenty-first century to reopen these Kaduna textile firms.