Paleolithic textile technology included a range of plant fibers and a broad variety of basketry, hunting tools and woven materials apart from clothing. Commonly recognized fibers used for textiles include flax (Linum usitatissimum) and wool from several different animals, but Upper Paleolithic hunter gatherers might have found useful fibers from several trees such as lime, willow, oak, elm, alder, yew, and ash, and plants including milkweed, nettle and hemp.
Hunter gatherers during the Upper Paleolithic used plant fibers and cordage for a number of useful things, including clothing, basketry, footwear, and nets for traps. Types of textiles found or implicated from the evidence in Eurasian UP sites include cordage, netting, and plaited basketry and textiles with simple twined, plaited and plain woven and twilled designs. Fiber-based hunting techniques for small game included traps, snares and nets.
To date, solid evidence for fishing seines and weirs date at least as old as the Mesolithic period; hand-spinning and loom-based weaving were developed by the Neolithic.
Sources and Further Information
Hurcombe, Linda 2008 Organics from inorganics: using experimental archaeology as a research tool for studying perishable material culture. World Archaeology 40(1):83–115.
Kvavadze, Eliso, et al. 2009 30,000-Year-Old Wild Flax Fibers. Science 325:1359.
Lupo, Karen D. and Dave N. Schmitt 2002 Upper Paleolithic Net-Hunting, Small Prey Exploitation, and Women’s Work Effort: A View From the Ethnographic and Ethnoarchaeological Record of the Congo Basin. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 9(2):147-179.
Minturn, Leigh 1996 The Economic Importance and Technological Complexity of Hand-Spinning and Hand-Weaving. Cross-Cultural Research 30:330-351.
Soffer, Olga 2004 Recovering Perishable Technologies through Use Wear on Tools: Preliminary Evidence for Upper Paleolithic Weaving and Net Making. Current Anthropology 45(3):407-424.
