Ancient fiber arts explored at Coshocton Library

We've heard the saying “a stitch in time saves nine,” but how long has humanity been playing with string? Let’s talk about the history of fiber arts.

The beginnings of fiber arts are so dimly lit they may have been in a cave. Deep in a Siberian cave, a 50,000-year-old bone needle was found. A cave in Southern France has produced a complex, pine-fiber cord, between 41,000 and 52,000 years old. A cave in South Africa has yielded what may be a bone needle more than 61,000 years old.

So what were they doing with fiber and how do we know about it?

At this time there was no written history. What we know about these ancient crafts comes from archaeologists. Centuries of work have yielded little organic matter, most having disintegrated. If you have ever wondered about the division of prehistory into “physical” ages — Stone, Copper, Bronze and Iron — these are not arbitrary designations but based on evidence.

Yet the Paleolithic Era has produced the first evidence of humans experimenting with dyes. Ochre could produce the color red “on command,” as in the Red Lady of Paviland’s burial in the United Kingdom. Certainly, it was Paleolithic folk who produced those early needles and pine yarn.

Humans began to domesticate both plants and animals in at least three locations around the world during the Neolithic Era. The most familiar would be the “Fertile Crescent" in the Middle East, which produced animals, vegetables and fiber. We now know the first fibers were probably “bast” fibers — linen, primarily, but also pine or other tree-fibers. Wool fibers also were possible later as sheep became more available.

In the Bronze Age, about 800 BCE, fabric has been found in the Austrian mountains, from an ancient Celtic people known to archaeologists as the Halstatt culture. We have surviving actual scraps of fabric dyed green and brown in woven wool twill plaids from here. An upright loom, reconstructed from a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age find, was announced only in March 2026. Preserved by a fire that collapsed a roof on it in Spain, it is the oldest known warp-weighted loom and likely of the type that produced the Halstatt fabric.

Here, we can place the curious invention sprang, a knotless netting. It’s made like a cross between weaving and tatting, looks like crochet, and stretches between two points like knitting. Used for everything from hairnets to fishing nets for tens of thousands of years, it was until recent times still used for a women’s traditional red belt in Greece.

Nalbinding is the art of using a single needle to work off your thumb and create a series of interlocking loops, often mistaken for knitting. The first identifiable nalbound items are the Coptic socks of circa 300s A.D. Egypt. It would prove a popular way to treat short lengths of fiber from the Far East to Northern Africa to Northwestern Europe.

However, Medieval European population growth prior to the 1300s Black Death was positively explosive, far outstripping the supplies available to keep one warm and dry with those warp-weighted looms. Therefore, it was in the 1200s the great floor loom was invented and weaving professionalized.

The 1200s also spelled the decline of nalbinding. From the Middle East to Western Europe, knitting took its place. There are many advantages to knitting: Working with two needles is faster than working with one. Because knitting doesn’t loop back on itself as much as nalbinding does, it uses half as much yarn. With a single continuous piece of yarn, most knitted objects also can be unwound and the yarn reused. Nalbinding held on in Scandinavia, where it seems the advantages of being able to use small pieces of scrap yarn to stay warm in bitterly cold climates outweighed any other consideration.

Over the course of millennia, one can trace fiber arts from spinning bast fibers by hand to the delicate lace of crochet, through the hard work of billions of unnamed people. These are people who clothed and kept warm themselves and others, people who have only lately and with modern archaeological finds begun to be celebrated.

The full program on this topic, A Stitch in Time: A History of Fiber Arts, will be held at 5:45 p.m. Wednesday, May 13 at the Coshocton County District Library. For more information and to register for the program, stop by the library, visit www.coshoctonlibrary.org or call 740-622-0956.