Correcting the Historical Bias Against Domestic Materials
Archaeology has traditionally had a fundamental bias against fabric. Fabrics are after all highly perishable, withering away within months or years, and only rarely leaving traces behind for those coming millennia later to find. Archaeologists—predominantly male—gave ancient ages names like “Iron” and “Bronze,” rather than “Pottery” or “Flax.” This implies that metal objects were the principal features of these times, when they are simply often the most visible and long-lasting remnants. Technologies using perishable materials, such as wood and textiles, may well have been more pivotal in the daily lives of the people who lived through them, but evidence of their existence has, for the most part, been absorbed back into the earth.
There are exceptions, of course, and traces can and do survive, usually thanks to an unusual climate: freezing, damp anaerobic conditions or extremely dry ones. The climate in Egypt, for example, is ideal for preserving all manner of usually perishable things and we subsequently know far more about ancient Egyptian textiles than those from most other regions. As archaeology has matured and diversified, scholars have increasingly looked for—and found—evidence of fine, complex textiles stretching farther back than anyone would have guessed. Their beauty and the skill needed to make them suggest a very different image of our earliest forebears than the club-wielding, simpleminded thugs of popular imagination.
“The first cultural device was probably a recipient… . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don ’t even care. I’m not telling that story. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news. And yet old. Before—once you think about it, surely long before—the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger—for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in—with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution. This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes, and other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. (“What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization,” Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all… . If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.“
—Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986)
It’s crazy how there is so much bias in how we see the past and the "advancement” of civilizations purely based on how well the remnants preserve in the climates they were in.
A civilization that built structures out of stone is assumed greater than a civilization that built structures out of wood or some biodegradable material
This makes me think of Rivercane (Arundinaria spp. our native bamboo which was almost wiped out in colonization similar to what happened to the Bison) and how it was used universally by the peoples of the Southeastern USA for every tool, structure, furniture etc imaginable: bedframes, waterproof mats for roofs, backpacks, sieves, shields, torches, sharp splits for quick-and-dirty butchering knives…
when the spanish first came here randomly roaming and murdering people all over the place they reported that the country was so populated that you could be in one town and see the smoke of the campfires of other towns on the horizons.
now bamboo by weight is stronger than steel, and Rivercane is one of the stronger species of bamboo. Bamboo-working in southeastern USA pre-colonization was crazy advanced. And you could use a split of Rivercane as a butchering knife in a pinch, and you could also use sharpened pieces as arrows without a stone projectile point at all. So there were all these useful objects and tools and constructions that were able to simply biodegrade away.
So people nowadays often assume there was hardly anybody here before white people showed up just because they don’t see all the constructions and temples and stuff.
What’s even crazier is you DO see the constructions all around you, literally the town I live in was built on top of an Indigenous town and many roads around it and leading to it were Indigenous roads.
(And there were quite a few stone constructions, but colonizers have been running wild all over the place so long that they’ve been knocked down and you literally couldn’t identify the ruins unless you thought “hey wait these stones don’t belong here, they had to be quarried and brought here” And in a lot of cases the locations of such ruins are not popularly discussed because looting and desecration of Indigenous sites is such a huge problem if anybody knows.)
(it’s so crazy actually in the history of Kentucky specifically like historical writers in the 1800’s had this theory that indigenous people had replaced this ancient civilization of white people that built all the stone stuff and made all the pottery and things. but now that the remnants are no longer as visible, the most popular falsehood is that NO ONE lived in Kentucky and it was just ‘hunting grounds.’ which is not true. its like people want to believe anything except that indigenous people were and are indigenous to this place)
