Script

Elizabeth Wayland Barber and The Age of String

JA: It’s not often that a book about textiles changes how we think about the world. But Elizabeth’s Wayland Barber’s book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years did just that. It came out in 1994. I read it shortly afterwards. I was learning to weave at the time, and I remember consuming it from cover to cover. What she said made instinctive sense. It combined tremendous life experience and scholarship, not just her own experience of archaeology, but also linguistics, mythology, anthropology, literature and ethnology, and, of course, her practical experience of being a weaver. For me it was as though someone had just switched the lights on.  

Instead of seeing textiles as a by-product of human society – something that the Egyptians had probably ‘invented’ just five to six thousand years ago, Wayland Barber put them at the heart of human experience and said that the creation of fibre and complex fabric was much, much older and was fundamental to the development of human society. She said it was principally an activity of women and if you wanted to understand how societies formed it was important to study textiles properly. The book was a bestseller, but behind the story of its success lay a gruelling struggle for funds in the face of ridicule that there might be anything at all to say about ancient textiles.  

EWB: They thought it was crazy because they thought there was nothing there. So everybody thought there was nothing to say. I knew there was lots to say. I didn’t know there was as much as there was going to turn out to be. 

JA: Welcome back to Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles after the summer break, and a special welcome to all our new listeners. I’m Jo Andrews, a handweaver interested in the stories textiles tell us, and the often hidden hands that fashion fibre and cloth into something useful and beautiful. These tales always have something new to tell us about ourselves and cast a fresh light on our families and communities.  

In this episode we celebrate one of the great figures of the textile world and track how Elizabeth Wayland Barber came to write her book, Women’s Work and the tremendous impact it has had on what we know about textiles and fibre. The book has just been re-issued to mark the 30th anniversary of its publication. In this month’s Haptic & Hue newsletter and on the webpage for this episode there is a discount code for those who would like 20% off the price of the new edition.  

It is one of the great privileges of Haptic & Hue that we get to talk to some incredible people: none more so for me than Dr Barber, who is now in her eighties and living in Utah. The tale of how she became the first person to construct a comprehensive narrative about how central fibre and cloth are to human development is a story that takes us right back to her own early childhood.  

EWB: My mother taught home economics before World War 2, and one of the things she taught was weaving. And so, she had a loom. And when we kids came along, we girls, I have a sister, and my earliest years were during the War and we didn’t have much. And so, Mom made all our clothes and I pulled this out. I made this when I was four with my mother and my grandmother’s help, and it’s a needle case, which I still use. They made it out of little scraps. The flowers are very tiny scraps of, of felt and a little bit of lace, which probably came off of somebody’s underwear, <laugh>. And I still have it and still use it. And so, so that’s how far back I go with actually being directly involved with textiles. But by the time I was eight, I know I was using the little table loom. And a rainy Saturday morning was made more interesting by getting Mama to open her cedar chest and show us the textiles that she had and tell us the stories, where they came from and so forth. So I was textiles up to here 

JA: That was one side of her childhood – but something just as important came from her father.   

EWB: But my dad was a physicist teaching math to engineers and doing research and blood flow. And he always used to say, never mind the discipline. Just follow the problem. When I was in fifth grade, if you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would’ve said, I wanna be a chemist and a physicist and a geologist, you know, and named all the sciences because I was steeped in it. When I was in seventh grade, my dad got moved to the basement of the geology department temporarily while they built a new engineering building. And so, when I had to wait for him and mama to go home, I would go up to the top floor where they had all the dinosaur bones. And my seventh grade homeroom teacher said to me, I understand you’re interested in fossils. And so here’s a book on fossil people. Well, it wasn’t, it was Bronze Age archaeology, <laugh>. And I was hooked. 

JA: She says she was hooked because archaeology was something that used all the sciences. Then when she was 13 her father got a year-long placement at the University of Strasbourg in France. This was a chance for the family to travel in Europe. 

EWB: My parents said to me and my sister, before we left, we want each of you to pick a topic on which you will inform the family wherever we go. And this is to keep us from being in the backseat saying, are we there yet? <Laugh>. I picked archaeology. I dragged my poor family to Viking fortresses in Scandinavia and Pompei and <laugh>, everything in between. And when we went to Paris towards the end of the trip, we had four days in Paris, and I spent three of them in the Louvre. And finally, my mom sort of picked me up by the scruff of the neck and said, you are not spending the fourth day in Paris in the, so by that time, by the time I got home, I was hardwired as an archaeologist. 

JA: At the same time the two sisters were noticing the differences and the similarities between the different European languages:  

EWB: And the other thing my sister and I were doing in the backseat was learning the numbers from one to 10 and how to say hello and please and thank you in every language whose borders, we crossed, because Papa spent the whole spring and summer visiting laboratories all over western Europe. And we kept saying, why is the Italian more like the French, but the Scandinavian is more like the German and the German’s more like the English and so forth.  

JA This created another interest – early languages – and when Dr Barber was applying to college, Linear B – the Minoan script used on Crete, had just been deciphered. 

EWB: So I was fascinated by the languages, the early languages. So, I went to Bryn Mawr where I could major in both archaeology and classical Greek, which I did, and took geology. And, you know, I’d already taken physics and chemistry in high school and written my term papers on things like infrared photography and radiocarbon data <laugh>. Okay, so here I am taking, well, I was particularly interested in Aegean archaeology, but I’m had to take Egyptian and Aegean and Mesopotamian and all this. And I’m looking at these wall paintings, and I’m saying that’s a typical weaving design that must have been copied off of a textile. Because Of course I’d been weaving since I was a kid. Okay. And they’d say, oh, they could have made stuff like that back then. And I’d think I could have done that when I was eight <laugh>. 

JA: So here’s what’s special about Elizabeth Wayland Barber, she IS this incredible academic with all the sciences to her name and yet she’s also a weaver who knows a practical weave design when she sees it.  

EWB So I finished my undergraduate degree, went to Yale to study Hittite, and my professor decided to retire early. So, I moved into the linguistics department, finished my PhD in linguistics, did both historical and structural. He said, well, we’re about to split, and you could, you should choose between historical and structural. I said, no, I need both. I need historical to understand the ancient language, and I need structural to work on it. 

JA:  She turned her PhD into a book called Archaeological Decipherment and then this brilliant young academic hit a problem. By rights she should have walked into a good job, but no: 

EWB: My husband was teaching at Princeton, which didn’t hire women. This was in the sixties. They didn’t hire women. 

Jo: They didn’t hire women at all? 

EWB: No, not, not for teaching, no. 

JA: And so Princeton lost one of the most original thinkers of her generation and the Barbers moved back to California, where they were both from. Elizabeth found a half time job teaching linguistics at Occidental College – a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles. 

EWB: And my husband looks at me and says, now what are you gonna do? And I said, well, I have this little project. He’s never forgiven me for the word little <laugh>. I said, I want to show people that ancient textiles were much more elaborate than they are thinking they were.  

JA So, she took herself back to the library and started looking at all the references she could find:  

EWB: So, I went back to Bryn Mawr for a week where the head of the archaeology department had really upset all the librarians. She had gotten all the books on archaeological stuff, and put them all into this, a seminar room filed by site and date, not by <laugh> Dewey decimal or whatever it was they used. So, I went back for a week and I knew that I could look, look for a particular site where I knew there were textile remains or whatever, and everything would be within inches in my hand. And then I found a friend of mine was now teaching there, and he was a weaver. When he heard what I was doing, he kept saying, I once thought I would try to work on some of this stuff, but I know I’m never going to have time. I’m going to bring you all my references. So, at the time I went home, I said to my husband, this is not going to be a little 10 page paper. This is going to be at least a 60 page monograph.  

JA And that too was a wild under-estimate, it took Elizabeth 17 years to research her great academic book Prehistoric Textiles, 17 years in which the Barbers lived very frugally. Elizabeth had a part time teaching job, Paul worked as a piano tuner and she managed to get the odd grant to travel in the summers to museums and libraries. She began piece by piece to put together the evidence to show that fibre and weaving was much older than five or six thousand years old, that it wasn’t simply plain weave, that ancient peoples enjoyed and valued dyed cloth and had considerable skills in creating far more complex fabric than had been imagined: 

EWB: Now, probably the key point in that is that everybody had told me that everybody wore plain white back then because the Egyptian clothing is until very late in the 18th Dynasty is always plain white. Well, when I eventually got a Guggenheim to Europe for three months and go to all over the place, all the museums that had the major collection, and the third from last was Cairo. And Paul had joined me in the Balkans because he thought I needed a bodyguard for the Balkans, and Egypt. And we get to Egypt and we discovered that every night you would wash out your clothing <laugh> in the wash basin. And you know, there’s a White Nile and a Blue Nile. There’s a third Nile, there’s a black Nile, which is what comes out of your clothes when you wash them because it is so hot and dusty. And that’s when I realized they were wearing white linen because they wanted to wash it all the time.

And they put colour on with that gorgeous jewellery that nobody else has that much of. So that was why, since Egypt was the only place where whole sets of clothing and so forth survived, all the archaeologists assumed everybody else wore plain white, but the Egyptians were wearing linen, which is hard to dye. And everybody else was making wool, which is easy to dye and comes in a bunch of natural colours anyway. And so I had to break through that barrier. When I had started and thought it was going be a 10 page paper, I felt there’s so much, there’s spindle whorls, loom weights. I know there’s, you know, representations of looms in Egypt and so forth. And I could at least demonstrate that they were capable of making fancier cloth. But once I got into it, I found there was far more data than that. 

JA:  And here’s where that fascination with languages that began in the back seat of her parents’ car traversing European borders and comparing languages with her sister, finally paid off: 

EWB: And I have always blessed the fact that I took the extra two years to get to PhD in linguistics, because I use linguistics every day. As I always say to my students, always said to my archaeology students, ancient cultures did not honour modern political boundaries. If you’re following a problem, as my dad always said, you may go across five countries, each of which speaks a different language, so the bibliography in Prehistoric Textiles is in 25 languages. And that’s only because I was able to do it because I had the PhD in linguistics. 

JA: She was also able to visit the generation of textile experts who came before her who specialised in specific areas – people like the Crowfoot family in Britain whose mother Grace had studied Egyptian and Sudanese textiles, Elisabeth Munksgaard, the expert on the textiles of the Danish bog bodies and Hans Jurgen Hundt the man who first catalogued the incredible Bronze and Iron Age textiles found in the Austrian Hallstatt Salt Mines.  

EWB: But other than that, all I ever found was a footnote, or it was usually not in the index of whatever excavation report I looked at. I just shelf browsed, endlessly shelf browsed. I got on the lecture circuit for the Archaeological Institute of America so that I could go to different universities and give talks. And every one of them, I’d write ahead on saying, can I spend three hours in your library? These are some of the things I’m looking for. We didn’t have interlibrary loan back then.  

JA: A key breakthrough that allowed Dr Barber to push back the date of textiles to 20,000 BCE was her understanding of how cloth developed out of string and fibre. 

EWB: When I started, people said textiles didn’t go back probably more than about 5,000 years or 5,000 BC at the earliest. And, one of the ways I had pushed it back to 20,000 BC was the Palaeolithic figurines with the string skirts. And so I had my eyes out for looking for string skirts because my biggest hobby ever since I was like six years old, is folk dancing and European folk dancing and costumes. And so <laugh>, it was a Saturday night and I was just finishing the last proofs of Prehistoric Textiles. And I finished them by supper time. And I said to Paul, they’re having a folk-dance concert at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium this evening. I’m gonna go and see if I can catch a ticket. And so, I did. And it was from Serbia, it was a Serbian group. And the beginning of the second act, according to program notes, this were going to be a suite of dances by the Vlachs who live on the eastern side way up in the mountains. And part of them are in Romanian, part of them are in, in, in Bulgaria’s, right on that border. And it’s way up in the mountains. And they said, and the costume for this is particularly archaic. Okay. Curtain opens out, they call it string skirts. And I’m like, oh my God. And I did a hand drawing of that and got it into the thing. It’s not a very good drawing, but it shows that, that I’ve done from a rather hazy photograph in the, in the program. And so I got that into, into Prehistoric Textiles and it’s still with us. 

JA: She was looking at relics from the deep past that were still with us today – items that for her meant that it would have been better to have called the Palaeolithic not the Stone Age but the Age of String.  

EWB: I mean, Stone Age was so set by the Scandinavian archaeologists who first tried to find some way back in the 19th century of, of setting up some kind of grid for, for what they were finding. Said, well, we’ve got the Stone Age and then we’ve got the Bronze Age, and then we’ve got the Iron Age. And yeah, it doesn’t work very well. But there is a logical progression there. But for the women, it was the, the age of string and better yet of fibre and all the things could be done with fibre. 

JA: After 17 years of work Prehistoric Textiles was finally published in 1991, but even then, she took great care to disguise her gender, publishing it simply under the name EJW Barber: 

EWB: So I had already used EJW Barber when I wrote Archaeological Decipherment, because I knew that men didn’t think a woman had any business doing all that linguistics and, and mathematics. And the reviews came out, Barber, he, they fell for it. They assumed with the three initials that I was some British Esquire. So, I did the same thing for this one. And the girls at Princeton both times, because Princeton did both those books, wrote the dust jacket copy with no pronouns. So slickly that you don’t notice, there aren’t any pronouns. <Laugh>, they did that with great glee <laugh>.  

JA: This was a ground-breaking book and even now it is still a classic for textile archaeologists. But in 1991 in America it was greeted with ……silence.  

EWB: So, when it came out, nobody knew what to do with it. So, in this country, American Journal of Archaeology never reviewed it. Archaeology never reviewed it. Nobody ever looked at it. But I think they didn’t know what to do with it. Nobody else had ever done this before. So, then who do you send the review to? Finally, Mary Elizabeth King wrote a long review for, I forget what journal, it was a journal that did American Archaeology and said, this is what we need to be doing for the ancient textiles of the Americas. And that was like a 12 page, you know, review article. And that was the only real review it got in this country. 

JA: But despite the lack of recognition, the book had a big impact – it opened people’s eyes to the fact that a lot of what they were seeing on archaeological digs and in museums might be related to textiles. 

EWB: But within two years I would be walking down, the corridor at the Archaeological Institute of America annual meetings. And I’d hear running down …..Dr. Barber, Dr. Barber, would you look at my photographs? Are these textile tools? And so, people were starting to become aware of it, but nobody ever reviewed it. Because, it was too different. It was too new. But it has become the book that everybody goes to and it’s way out of date. And it still is. It gives you the beginning. Yeah. It gives you the beginnings. 

JA: And she began to give lectures based on the book. 

EWB: I was doing lecture tours and so forth, and Paul said to me, when are you going to write the other book? And I said, what other book? And he said, well, every time you give a lecture, what people ask you about is to tell them more about what you’ve said about the women who was doing this work. 

JA: Paul came up with the title Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. The publishers Norton loved the title so much they gave her a contract and Elizabeth began to write, this time for a less academic audience:  

EWB: A lot of the reason I wrote it was I was getting upset at all the pie in the sky possible women’s history that was complete fiction, that people were purveying as women’s early history. and so I aimed it at the Women’s Studies courses, college, freshman, sophomores type thing. 

JA: So, what she had to do now was to stop being an academic and start writing stories. 

EWB: The head of nonfiction at Norton edited my book. And we had some little rows about things. But he was, he was very good. I really learned a lot from him about how he, he’d say, you’re getting too academic here. You gotta lighten this up. And the famous one was in the Palaeolithic chapter and he says, I need more stories here. I think, how do I come up with stories for the Palaeolithic? 

JA: One of the things that helped her to do that is her childhood practice of weaving. Her knowledge of textiles is anchored in the practical experience of it. 

EWB: That’s right. And I, I keep saying, you know, I decide to try to make a reweaving of this and such a piece and say it was a belt or a, an edge band that I’d see over and over again on the frescoes, like the Mycenean frescoes. Okay. So here I am, you know, I’ve tied the end of my bunch of string to my lamp post, and I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, you know, I could get my book done a lot faster if I’d spend my time on it and writing instead of doing this. And then I’d get an aha and I’d realize what they had done and why they’d done it. It was the only way to do it is to actually take all that time to try to repeat it. 

JA: And that’s the difference between Elizabeth Wayland Barber and the other academics of her generation. She created a book that has stood the test of time because she was both a doer and a thinker, although the academic in her was ambivalent at the time: 

EWB: Well, to be perfectly honest, when I wrote it, I felt that compared to Prehistoric Textiles and the previous book, Archaeological Decipherment, that it was kind of a piece of fluff. But in rereading it and seeing the impact that it had, I, I realized I did it right <laugh>, and, and it did have impact, and it did make people stop and think we know more about early women than we thought we did. 

JA: But it did something else just as important – the two books, Women’s Work and Prehistoric Textiles created a context in which other archaeologists could begin to look for the evidence that Dr Barber was writing about. One of the sites she originally wrote about was Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic where they had pieces of pottery dating back to 25,000BC.   

EWB: And I looked all through that publication hoping that they would show a piece of clay that had a bit of impression of string or textile on it. Couldn’t find it. But I mentioned it. And, many years later, in the mid-nineties, they reopened that site. And a friend of mine in Illinois was asked, who was an archaeologist, and is of Ukrainian background, she was asked to come and work on that. And she knew what I’d said about that site. And she looked through 10,000 pieces of broken pottery. And she found about 25 pieces that had impressions of string and textiles. And it turned out the textiles were not only twined, but there was at least one piece of true weave represented 25,000 BC. Okay. So she publishes all this stuff. And then my friends at UCLA who have of course had heard me talk quite a lot, were excavating in Georgia. And they found remnants of string of three or four different colours from 30,000 BC in a cave. See now people are looking for it, especially if there are women on the team.  

JA: 30 years on she regrets not calling the book Women’s Work: The First 30,000 Years – as now the dates of the first textiles and fibres have been pushed back so much further, in particular Dr Barber says there has been a find in France that dates back at least 55,000 years before the present.   

EWB: We’re discovering that the before is a lot before than we thought. Just recently, there’s this find in Northern France of deliberately made string …Neanderthal. <laugh> Well, and as I said, in Prehistoric Textiles, and probably again, in, in Women’s Work by 20,000 BC they were already so good at it that it had to be, have a much earlier history. 

JA: In around 2014 Dr Barber was invited to a conference about ancient textiles at Hallstatt Austria. 

EWB: Most of the people giving papers were women on ancient, on ancient textiles. Not all of them, but most of them. And as they discovered who I was, they would come up to me and say, thank you for having written your books, because I was interested in archaeology, but stones and bones just didn’t do it for me. And then I discovered archaeological textiles. So here was this entire lecture room full of European women working on ancient textiles. <Laugh>. And I just about cried, you know, this was so wonderful. Because I never get any feedback because I was teaching in a tiny little college way off. And, you know, it was about as far from Europe as it could be and so forth. So, it was just amazing to see all these women who had discovered archaeological textiles and it was the kind of archaeology they wanted to do.  

JA: There is no doubt Elizabeth Wayland Barber is the guiding spirit of a whole new generation of archaeologists who understand how important textiles are and just how much they have to tell us about the skills our ancestors had and the contribution they made to our societies. Because of her work, ancient textiles are no longer discarded as worthless and even better, now we know that humans like us have been creating string, fibre and cloth for thousands and thousands of years and that they have served humanity incredibly well in a myriad of ways.  

EWB: Well, as one of my friends always said, if your work’s your play, you got it made. If you enjoy making cloth, if you enjoy weaving, embroidering, whatever, if you really enjoy working with textiles, then it’s wonderful. I mean it’s like the women were saying to me they didn’t like stones and bones, but they did like textiles. So now they’ve got this wonderful career. And I think that’s the way it is. You have to go where your love is. 

JA: Thank you to Elizabeth Wayland Barber for her time and wisdom in telling us the story of how she wrote Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. You can find out more about this episode, and get details of the discount on the new edition of Women’s Work at www.hapticandhue.com/listen-series-6  

Haptic & Hue is hosted by me, Jo Andrews, and edited and produced by Bill Taylor. It is an independent production supported by its listeners, who bring us ideas and generously fund us via Buy Me A Coffee, or by becoming a Friend of Haptic & Hue. This keeps the podcast free from advertising and sponsorship. It also brings you something extra every month with a separate podcast called Travels with Textiles, hosted by Bill Taylor and me, where we cover a whole range of different textile news and topics. This month’s new episode has details of a special exhibition in New York on Real Clothes and Real Lives – this is not couture but something very far from it, a look at the clothes that women actually wore in the 19th and 20th centuries. We’ll also have an interview with Ekta Kaul on her new book about India’s beloved Kantha cloth. You can find out more about Friends of Haptic & Hue at www.hapticandhue.com/join  

We’ll be back next month with a brand new podcast, but until then, enjoy your making.