Making thread in Bronze Age Britain
July 26, 2018, University of Cambridge
A micrograph of the spliced textile from Over barrow, Cambridgeshire. Credit: M. Gleba, S. Harris, with permission of Cambridge Archaeological Unit
A new study published this week in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences has identified that the earliest plant fibre technology for making thread in Early Bronze Age Britain and across Europe and the Near East was splicing not spinning.
In splicing, strips of plant fibres (flax, nettle, lime tree and other species) are joined in individually, often after being stripped from the plant stalk directly and without or with only minimal retting—the process of introducing moisture to soften the fibres.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-thread-bronze-age-britain.html#jCp
