by Nicoletta Maestri (updated by K. Kris Hirst)

Updated June 14, 2016 

Cotton (Gossypium sp.) is one of the most important and earliest domesticated non-food crops in the world. Used primarily for its fiber, cotton was domesticated independently in both the Old and New Worlds. The word "cotton" originated from the Arabic term al qutn, which became in Spanish algodón and cotton in English.

Nearly all the cotton produced in the world today is the New World species Gossypium hirsutum, but before the 19th century, several species were grown on different continents.

The four domesticated Gossypium species of the Malvaceae family are G. arboreum L., domesticated in the Indus Valley of Pakistan and India; G. herbaceum L. from Arabia and Syria; G. hirsutum from Mesoamerica; and G. barbadense from South America.

All four domestic species and their wild relatives are shrubs or small trees which are traditionally grown as summer crops; domesticated versions are highly drought- and salt-tolerant crops that grow well in marginal, arid environments. Old World cottons have short, coarse, weak fibers that are today primarily used for stuffing and quilt making; New World cottons have higher production demands but provide longer and stronger fibers and higher yields.

MAKING COTTON

Wild cotton is photo-period sensitive--in other words, the plant begins to germinate when the day length reaches a certain point. Wild cotton plants are perennial and their form is sprawling.

Domestic versions are short, compact annual shrubs which do not respond to changes in day length--that's an advantage if the plant grows in places with cool winters because both wild and domestic cottons are frost-intolerant.

Cotton fruits are capsules or bolls which contain several seeds covered by two kinds of fiber: short ones called fuzz and long ones called lint.

Only the lint fibers are useful for making textiles; and the domestic plants have larger seeds covered with comparatively abundant lint. Cotton is traditionally harvested by hand, and then the cotton is ginned--processed to separate the seeds from the fiber.

After the ginning process, the cotton fibers are batted with a wooden bow to make them more flexible, and carded with a hand comb to separate the fibers before spinning. Spinning twists the individual fibers into a yarn, which can be completed by hand with a spindle and spindle whorl or with a spinning wheel.

OLD WORLD COTTON

Cotton was first domesticated in the Old World about 7,000 years ago; the earliest archaeological evidence for cotton use is from the Neolithic occupation of Mehrgarh, in the Kachi Plain of Balochistan, Pakistan, in the sixth millennium BC. Cultivation of G. arboreumbegan in the Indus Valley of India and Pakistan, and then eventually spread over Africa and Asia, whereas G. herbaceum was first cultivated in Arabia and Syria.

The two main species, G. arboreum and G. herbaceum, are genetically very different and probably diverged well before domestication. Specialists agree that the wild progenitor of G. herbaceum was an African species, whereas the ancestor of G. arboreum is still unknown.

Regions of possible origin of the G. arboreum wild progenitor are likely Madagascar or the Indus Valley, where the most ancient evidence for cultivated cotton has been found.

Gossypium arboreum

Abundant archaeological evidence exists for the initial domestication and use of G. arboreum, by the Harappan (aka Indus Valley) civilization in Pakistan. Mehrgarh, the earliest agricultural village in the Indus Valley, has multiple lines of evidence of cotton seeds and fibers beginning about 6000 BP. At Mohenjo-Daro, fragments of cloth and cotton textiles have been dated to the fourth millennium BC, and archaeologists agree that most of the trade that made the city grow was based on cotton exportation.

Raw material and finished cloth were exported from south Asia into Dhuweila in eastern Jordan by 6450-5000 years ago, and to Maikop (Majkop or Maykop) in the northern Caucasus by 6000 BP.

Cotton fabric has been found at Nimrud in Iraq (8th-7th centuries BC), Arjan in Iran (late 7th-early 6th centuries BC) and Kerameikos in Greece (5th century BC). According to Assyrian records of Sennacherib (705-681 BC), cotton was grown in the royal botanical gardens at Nineveh, but cool winters there would have made large-scale production impossible.

Because G. arboreum is a tropical and subtropical plant, cotton agriculture did not spread outside the Indian subcontinent until thousands of years after its domestication. Cotton cultivation is first seen in the Persian Gulf at Qal'at al-Bahrain (ca 600-400 BC), and in North Africa at Qasr Ibrim, Kellis and al-Zerqa between the 1st and 4th centuries AD. Recent investigations at Karatepe in Uzbekistan have found cotton production dated between ca. 300-500 AD. Cotton may have been grown in the Xinjiang (China) province cities of Turfan and Khotan by the 8th century AD. Cotton was finally adapted to grow in more temperate climates by the Islamic Agricultural Revolution, and between 900-1000 AD, a boom in cotton production spread into Persia, Southwest Asia, North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin.

Gossypium herbaceum

G. herbaceum is much less well-known than G. arboreum. Traditionally it is known to grow in African open forests and grasslands. Characteristics of its wild species are a taller plant, compared to the domesticated shrubs, smaller fruit and thicker seed coats. Unfortunately, no clear domesticated remains of G. herbaceum have been recovered from archaeological contexts. However, the distribution of its closest wild progenitor suggests a northward distribution toward North Africa, and the Near East.

NEW WORLD COTTON

Among the American species, G. hirsutum was apparently cultivated first in Mexico, and G. barbadense later in Peru. However, a minority of researchers believe, alternatively, that the earliest type of cotton was introduced into Mesoamerica as an already domesticated form of G. barbadense from coastal Ecuador and Peru.

Whichever story ends up to be correct, cotton was one of the first non-food plants domesticated by the prehistoric inhabitants of the Americas.

In the Central Andes, especially in the north and central coasts of Peru, cotton was part of a fishing economy and a marine-based life style. People used cotton to make fishing nets and other textiles. Cotton remains have been recovered in many sites on the coast especially in residential middens.

Gossypium hirsutum (Upland cotton)

The oldest evidence of Gossypium hirsutum in Mesoamerica comes from the Tehuacan valley and has been dated between 3400 and 2300 BC. In different caves of the region, archaeologists affiliated to the project of Richard MacNeish found remains of fully domesticated examples of this cotton.

Recent studies have compared bolls and cotton seeds retrieved from excavations in Guila Naquitz Cave, Oaxaca, with living examples of wild and cultivated G. hirsutum punctatumgrowing along the east coast of Mexico. Additional genetic studies (Coppens d'Eeckenbrugge and Lacape 2014) support the earlier results, indicating that G.

hirsutum was likely originally domesticated in the Yucatán Peninsula .

In different eras and among different Mesoamerican cultures, cotton was a highly demanded good and a precious exchange item. Maya and Aztec merchants traded cotton for other luxury items, and nobles adorned themselves with woven and dyed mantles of the precious material.

Aztec kings often offered cotton products to noble visitors as gifts and to army leaders as payment.

Gossypium barbadense (Pima cotton)

The first clear evidence of domesticated Pima cotton comes from the Ancón-Chillón area of the central coast of Peru. The sites of this area show the domestication process began during the Preceramic period, beginning about 2500 BC. By 1000 BC the size and shape of Peruvian cotton bolls were indistinguishable from today's modern cultivars of G. barbadense.

Cotton production began on the coasts, but eventually moved inland, facilitated by the construction of canal irrigation. By the Initial Period, sites such as Huaca Prieta contained domestic cotton 1,500 to 1,000 years before pottery and maize cultivation. Unlike in the old world, cotton in Peru was initially part of subsistence practices, used for fishing and hunting nets, as well as textiles, clothing and storage bags.

SOURCES

This glossary entry is a part of the About.com guide to the Domestication of Plants, and the Dictionary of Archaeology.

Bouchaud C, Tengberg M, and Dal Prà P. 2011. Cotton cultivation and textile production in the Arabian Peninsula during antiquity; the evidence from Madâ’in Sâlih (Saudi Arabia) and Qal’at al-Bahrain (Bahrain).

Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 20(5):405-417.

Brite EB, and Marston JM. 2013. Environmental change, agricultural innovation, and the spread of cotton agriculture in the Old World. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology32(1):39-53.

Coppens d'Eeckenbrugge G, and Lacape J-M. 2014. Distribution and Differentiation of Wild, Feral, and Cultivated Populations of Perennial Upland Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean. PLoS ONE 9(9):e107458.

Moulherat C, Tengberg M, Haquet J-F, and Mille Bt. 2002. First Evidence of Cotton at Neolithic Mehrgarh, Pakistan: Analysis of Mineralized Fibres from a Copper Bead. Journal of Archaeological Science 29(12):1393-1401.

Nixon S, Murray M, and Fuller D. 2011. Plant use at an early Islamic merchant town in the West African Sahel: the archaeobotany of Essouk-Tadmakka (Mali).

Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 20(3):223-239.

Peters AH. 2012. Identity, innovation and textile exchange practices at the Paracas Necropolis, 2000 BP. Textiles and Politics: Textile Society of America 13th Biennial Symposium Proceedings. Washington DC: Textile Society of America.

Wendel JF, and Grover CE. 2015. Taxonomy and Evolution of the Cotton Genus, Gossypium. Cotton. Madison, WI: American Society of Agronomy, Inc., Crop Science Society of America, Inc., and Soil Science Society of America, Inc. p 25-44.

Updated by K. Kris Hirst

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History of Textiles

When did People Learn to Make Cloth?

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 Wild flax fibers from Unit C, Dzudzuana Cave, Georgia. [Image courtesy of Science/AAAS

by K. Kris Hirst

Updated August 09, 2016 

Textiles, to archaeologists anyway, can mean woven cloth, bags, nets, basketry, string-making, cord impressions in pots, sandals or other objects created out of organic fibers. This technology is at least 30,000 years old, although preservation of the textiles themselves is rare in prehistory, so it may be quite a bit older still.

Because textiles are perishable, often the oldest evidence of the use of textiles is implied from impressions left in burned clay or the presence of weaving-related tools such as awls, loom weights or spindle whorls.

Preservation of intact fragments of cloth or other textiles has known to occur when archaeological sites are in extreme conditions of cold, wet or dry; when fibers come into contact with metals such as copper; or when textiles are preserved by accidental charring.

THE HISTORY OF TEXTILES

The oldest example of textiles yet identified by archaeologists is at the Dzudzuana Cave in the former Soviet state of Georgia. There, a handful of flax fibers was discovered that had been twisted, cut and even dyed a range of colors. The fibers were radiocarbon-dated to between 30,000-36,000 years ago.

• See the photo essay on the Dzudzuana Cave Textiles

Much of the early use of cloth began with making string. The earliest string-making to date was identified at the Ohalo II site in modern Israel, where three fragments of twisted and plied plant fibers were discovered and dated to 19,000 years ago.

• Read more about the Ohalo II site

The Jomon culture in Japan--believed to be among the earliest pottery makers in the world--have evidence of cord-making, in the form of impressions in ceramic vessels from Fukui Cave, and dated ~13,000 years ago. Archaeologists chose the word Jomon to refer to this ancient hunter-gather culture because it means "cord-impressed".

• Read more about the Jomon

The occupation layers discovered at Guitarrero Cave in the Andes mountains of Peru contained agave fibers and textile fragments that were dated to ~12,000 years ago. That's the oldest evidence of textile use in the Americas to date.

• Read more about Guitarrero Cave Textiles
• Read more about Agave

The earliest example of cordage in North America is at Windover Bog in Florida, where the special circumstances of the bog chemistry preserved textiles (among other things) dated to 8,000 years ago.

• Read more about the Windover Bog site

Silk making, which is made from thread derived from insect cases rather than plant material, was invented during the Longshan period in China, ca 3500-2000 BC.

• Read about silk and silk making
• Read about the Longshan Period

Finally, one extremely important (and unique in the world) use of string in South America was as quipu, a system of communication composed of knotted and dyed cotton and llama wool string used by many South American civilizations at least 5,000 years ago.

• Quipu
• Oldest Example of Quipu

FURTHER INFORMATION

See the links above for references on the specific sites. A textile bibliography has been collected for this article.

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July 2011

Notes on Embroidery

-signified high social status in Muslim societies
-craftsman embroidered items with gold and silver thread

Silk and metallic thread on felt

Skin Deep: the Fall of Fur

For many women in postwar Britain a fur coat – preferably mink – represented the height of luxury, the ultimate object of desire. In popular culture the ambition to own a fur coat became a defining quality of femininity, tantamount to a secondary sexual characteristic. Cartoons made play of this, as when Punchpublished ‘The First Mink’, a series of drawings by Alex Graham which showed women reluctant to take off their fur coats in summertime, at cocktail parties in warm rooms or even while doing the washing up. In one of these images a tiny girl with a big smile parades before a mirror in her mother’s fur, its hemline trailing on the floor. If a woman was lucky a rich husband or male protector would buy her a fur. If she came into money in her own right it surprised no one if the first thing she bought herself was a fur coat. Fur epitomised a dream of glamour, the height of fashion, a longing for comfort and success.

It had been worn throughout history but never by so many as in the affluent West in the first half of the last century. The fur trade had grown immeasurably since the Hudson’s Bay Company had been incorporated by Royal Charter in 1670. Demand for hats made from felted beaver had begun to decline by the mid-19th century but coats – fashioned from a variety of pelts, but particularly sealskin – remained popular among men and women. Those worn by Victorian gentlemen tended to have the fur facing inwards as a lining; whereas women’s coats fashionably sported bands of fur as a trim around the hemline, collars and cuffs. Prince Albert was supplied with ‘a coat of Tartar foal-skin’ by the internationally renowned furrier Nicholay and Son, with whom he worked closely in organising the Great Exhibition of 1851. Later in the century Nicholay merged with Debenham and Freebody, which became famous for its supply of furs to royalty, including coronation robes and even a mantle of black fox for Tsar Alexander II of Russia.

The late Victorians and Edwardians marvelled at what they saw as the ‘Romance of Furriery’. The Franco-British Exhibition at the White City in 1908 featured four ‘Dioramas’ organised by the celebrated French furrier Revillon Frères, showing a company steamer amid ice in Hudson Bay in Canada, a remote fur post, pelts in a Bokhara bazaar and elegant fur-clad women seated in a box at the opera. The landmark documentary film Nanook of the North, with its memorable account of an Eskimo (Inuit) family, sheathed in fur trousers against the Arctic winds, building igloos and harpooning walrus and seal, was funded by Revillon Frères in 1920-21. Meanwhile, the writer Elinor Glyn (1864-1943) was writhing, semi-clad, on tiger skins and writing sensational, best-selling fiction about miscreant heroines and ‘It’girls who exuded sex-appeal. She was soon to turn her talents to Hollywood scriptwriting for the nascent film industry, which popularised the wearing of fur in ever-more extravagant quantities.

The late Victorian period had witnessed an alarmingly gruesome vogue for the wearing of jackets, hats and muffs trimmed with whole birds, stuffed kittens’ heads and baby squirrels. Photographs from the 1900s show girls of even modest means flaunting wide stoles, edged with tails and tiny paws. Edith Carrington, a contemporary animal rights activist and editor of the journal Our Animal Brothers, campaigned tirelessly against the practice, with publications such as Pleadings for Dumb Plaintiffs, Grandmother Pussy and The Dog: His Rights and Wrongs. An illustrated booklet published in Bristol in 1911 entitled Fashionable Furs: How They Are Obtainedfeatured harrowing stories such as ‘The Kindly Little Musquash’ and ‘A Dying Creature’s Reproach’. But, while campaigns against the destruction of tropical birds and egrets (whose feathers were used in millinery) met with some success, few were squeamish about the wearing of fur coats. Demand for fur rocketed and was likened by Agnes Laut, an American writer on the subject, to the tulip craze of the 17th century. Laut had short shrift for those who saw cruelty in the fur trade, contending that they usually enjoyed eating bacon and roast beef.

In England social unease about women’s growing independence through the First World War fed into attacks on munitions workers, who were often accused of hankering after fur coats while their menfolk suffered in the trenches. Women’s passion for cinema stimulated the desire for fur still further: it came to epitomise glamour and screen stars of the 1920s and 1930s boasted coats with towering fur collars or swathed themselves in wraps and full length coats of fox and sable. A fur coat represented a dream of a better life to many women. In Easy Living, a film of 1937, a marital disagreement between a rich financier and his wife prompts the husband to throw his wife’s expensive new sable coat out of the window. It lands on Mary Smith, a poor hardworking girl whose life is transformed into a fairy-tale romance in consequence. Sable, the most expensive fur, was beyond the reach of working-class women, who found cheaper substitutes in rabbit, nutria, skunk or squirrel. A writer in The British Fur Trade estimated that two out of three women on any street in any town in England in the 1920s would be found wearing fur, if not as a coat, then as a trim of some kind.

The 1930s saw London consolidate itself as a world centre of the fur trade. Leipzig lost out to London as waves of refugees fled from Europe and Jewish furriers, such as the Hungarian Calman Links, established themselves in Britain. Craftsmen and big brokers like Henry Kiver of Fenchurch Street flourished alongside an army of dressers and cleaners, who advertised their ability to work on pelts of just about anything once living, ‘from a mole to a buffalo’. Trade journals dedicated to furriery proliferated and are a useful source for the historian today, as are the records of institutions such as ‘Empire Fur Week’, organised by the London Fur Trade Association from 1934. Reports of the fur auctions of the period indicate the scale of the industry; at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s bi-annual sales in the 1930s, many hundreds of thousands of fox, ermine, beaver and mink pelts came under the hammer. The range of species skinned was equally mind-boggling, including badger, skunk, wolf, polecat, squirrel, musk ox, monkey, nutria, raccoon, wombat and wallaby. Even hamsters and house cats were skinned for their fur.

Demand for beaver pelts had driven that animal to the brink of extinction in Europe and Scandinavia in the 18th century. Concern for the depletion of wildlife and the costs of trapping and transport encouraged fur farming in the West. When the demand for fox furs peaked in the 1930s many turned to breeding the coveted varieties, particularly silver, blue, platinum and white (Arctic) fox. Some 150 silver fox fur breeders were listed in the British Fur Trade Yearbook for 1933. It was suggested that the occupation was particularly suited to women, although the actual killing of the animals would require the services of a hired man. Film footage from the period shows very little sentimentality in all this. In an example from Eve’s Film Review of 1931, for instance, the camera pans over baby foxes pawing helplessly against wire netting with a brisk voice-over announcing: ‘It’s tough luck to be a soft silky fox – even though you might finish as a caressing necklet around some ravishing young lady’s shoulders!’

The demand for fox seemed insatiable in the 1930s, but its fall from fashion after the Second World War was dramatic. Instead mink became the fur most coveted by women. J.G. Links, son of the furrier Calman Links, mused on the fickleness of fashion in this respect. Gone were the days ‘when a hundred thousand silver foxes alone would be offered for sale and eagerly competed for in one London auction alone’, he wrote. Red fox was now deemed just about unsaleable and he found it incredible ‘that a Kamchatka red fox, with its deep golden-red colouring like a Turner sunset, and its caressing, sensuous fur, should today find no buyers at fewer shillings than I used to pay pounds for it’. By the 1950s Links estimated that sales of mink were worth three to four times as much in money terms as all other furs put together. Some six million mink were being ‘produced’ annually by this time.

The vogue for mink in postwar Britain was such that women who could not hope for a mink coat would console themselves with a stole, a fur tie, a mink brooch or even a pair of mink earrings. The fur’s cachet was such that one might buy cosmetics in the shade of ‘mutation mink’ (Gala), or even Steiner’s White Mink perfume. Diana Dors, Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe, caused a sensation when she appeared on the Venice Lido during the film festival in what was supposed to have been a mink bikini – although she later confessed that it had really been made from rabbit.

But would mink, in its turn, fall out of fashion? Links had pointed out that skunk fur, popular before fox, was now worthless. He recommended those who still had muffs or stoles in skunk to burn them before they suffered an infestation of moth or weevil. Fox was going the same way but Links thought it unlikely that mink would fall from favour:

My own guess is that when women stop wearing mink they will stop wearing fur altogether, and as this eventuality has not occurred for several thousand years, it will, I hope, be postponed for yet a little longer.

Few foresaw how thoroughly fashion was to fall out with fur in Britain in the late 20th century. How do we explain this? It has often been assumed that the animal rights movement was successful in changing public attitudes. The uncompromisingly militant Animal Liberation Front was formed in 1976, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) in 1980 and Lynx, the animal welfare trust, in 1984. Lynx mounted a high-profile advertising and poster campaign in the 1980s, most memorably distributing an image by David Bailey which showed a model trailing a fur coat oozing blood on the catwalk with the slogan: ‘It takes up to 40 dumb animals to make this but only one to wear it.’ The organisation attracted the support of celebrities who vowed not to wear fur. Anti-fur protestors sprayed red paint on those wearing fur in public and attacked fur farms. By the 1990s many fur retailers and fur sections in department stores such as Debenhams and Harrods closed and fur farming became illegal in the UK in 2002.

So did the animal rights movement drive the fur coat wearing classes to extinction? Britain is not wholly representative here – fur farming continues in large sections of the world and many women in Europe and elsewhere continue to wear their fur coats with pride. The British experience was not clear cut. Fur was falling from favour well before the activism of the 1980s. In the late 1950s the price of mink fell dramatically. The cost of manufacturing a mink coat now exceeded that of the raw materials and there were many in the trade who felt that the luxury status of fur was becoming a thing of the past. Demand began to fall. The widespread adoption of central heating no doubt played some part: in bitter cold, nothing keeps you warm like natural fur. But the truth was that the fur coat, once the epitome of glamour and luxury, acquired unfashionable connotations from the 1960s. It signified an older, less trendy and more dependent kind of femininity. The urbane and discreet Links had insisted that most furs were bought by husbands for their wives and not for their mistresses. But in the popular mind the fur coat had come to signify hussies on the make or the kept woman.

This had little appeal for the young woman of the 1960s. When she rose to television fame as a popular singer in the 1950s, Alma Cogan had celebrated by buying two silver blue mink coats, one for herself and the other for her mother. She had offered to buy one for her younger sister, Sandra, too, but Sandra had demurred. She wanted to be seen as a serious actress ‘and a sort of beatnik’, she recorded, and she insisted on a duffel coat instead. Fur was a dying trend. Fur coats, once lovingly consigned to ‘cold storage’ facilities in department stores in summer, went to the back of the wardrobe instead. Many found their way to flea-markets or car-boot sales in the new millennium.

Carol Dyhouse is Research Professor in History, University of Sussex and the author of Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (Zed Books, 2010).

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