The oldest known piece of cloth, woven 9,000 years ago near the headwaters of the Tigris River, is helping two University of Chicago archeologists weave together the still incomplete story of man's civilizing march from the cave to the city.
Discovery of the 3-inch-by-1 1/2-inch fossilized swatch of cloth is being announced Tuesday by the University of Chicago and Istanbul University. A team of archeologists from the two universities found the cloth, woven from flax fibers, at the site of an ancient village they have been jointly excavating since 1964. The artifact now belongs to the Turkish national museum.
The cloth, wound by a prehistoric villager around a tool handle made of an animal antler, was found in 1988. Linda and Dr. Robert Braidwood of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute had been waiting since then for confirmation that what they found was indeed a piece of cloth.
The Braidwoods, who have been working in Middle Eastern archeological sites since the 1930s, are the acknowledged world leaders in the scholarly search for how man progressed from caves to civilization.
"In 1988 we recovered this antler haft with a very curious, clear impression of cloth or something that had hardened and fossilized," said Robert Braidwood, 85, now an emeritus professor at the institute.
He said it took several years for the world's leading authority on ancient textiles, Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood of the Netherlands' National Museum of Ethnology, to get to Turkey to study the haft. Her recent confirmation that the fossilized material is a piece of cloth prompted the announcement of the discovery.
"People learned to weave baskets first," Vogelsang-Eastwood said in a confirming report, "and then used those weaving techniques for cloth."
She said existence of the cloth shows people then had some sort of loom. It appears, she said, to have been produced by a primitive method of weaving on a simple frame over which vertical threads were stretched so that horizontal threads could be entwined with them.
The site at which the cloth was found is called Cayonu (pronounced CHY-eh-new), an archeological dig the Braidwoods began with Prof. Halet Cambel of Istanbul University in 1964. The ancient village had lain undiscovered for thousands of years under farm fields near the headwaters of the Tigris in eastern Turkey.
The fact that cave people began to collect in year-round villages such as the one at Cayonu was crucial to the subsequent appearance of civilization, Braidwood said. Villages enabled people to break society into divisions of labor, meaning not everybody had to farm and hunt for survival. That allowed the beginnings of technologies such as weaving, and, ultimately, the development of law, monarchies and the written word.
"We are guessing the shift from a hunting-gathering fashion of life to one dependent on domestication of plants and animals began 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. The achievement of civilization was a very gradual process that took thousands of years," Braidwood said.
Civilization, he said, could not occur without Stone Age people first abandoning their lifestyle as hunter-gatherers and becoming food producers.
The first villagers, he said, domesticated plants such as wheat, chickpeas, lentils and bitter vetch. Later they domesticated animals, starting with dogs and going on to sheep, goats, cattle and probably pigs.
"All these plants and animals were available in their wild form in southwestern Asia, but we have identified most of them in their domesticated and planted forms in this village," said Braidwood.
Covering an area of about five football fields, the Cayonu site, Braidwood said, was continuously occupied by as many as 500 people at any given time for well over 1,000 years.
Braidwood said the project at Cayonu has established that the site underwent six different "successions," or sub-phases of development marked by changes of architectural styles. Each stage has been dated through the radiocarbon method of materials found in the buildings.
"We can guess that it began 10,240 years ago with round wattle and daub (stick and mud) buildings," he said.
The cloth-covered tool handle, he said, was found in a house of more advanced architectural technique, with six or seven small rectangular rooms built on stone foundations, called "cell" houses. Cell houses appeared in the fifth of the village's six stages of development, he said, about the time animals were first being domesticated.
By that time (7000 B.C.), he said, village occupants were using stone, bone and copper tools. One larger building in Cayonu, which he believes was used communally for ancient religious observances, had floors made of terrazzo.
"That means they used plaster," he said, "which means they had learned how to burn limestone and get cement to make hard floors."