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String theory: the tradition of spinning raw fibers dates back at least 28,000 years
Natural History, April, 2002 by Meredith F. Small
Wandering one day through the Museums Hall of South American Peoples, I noticed a case with the label "Amazonian Rain Forest." Against the backdrop of a mural of bright green vegetation are all sorts of material goods from several Amazonian Indian tribes. Some items are curios, such as a necklace of peccary teeth and a piranha jaw fashioned into a cutting tool. Others are spectacular creations, such as a headdress made of iridescent blue and green birds strung together. But what struck me most was a mundane ball of string, about ten inches in diameter--yards and yards of fiber sitting there as if at the ready for wrapping packages.
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As with many simple household objects, the ball of string tells a more complicated story. This particular sample was made from chambira palm fiber by the Tukano people of Brazil and Colombia. Laila Williamson, a senior scientific assistant in the Museum's anthropology department, tells me that in Amazonian cultures, it is mostly the men who make natural string. They first strip the thin cuticle layer from the middle rib of a young palm leaf, then soak the fibers for pliability. To make continuous string, the fiber strips are dried and spun together, end overlapping end. Imitating the process, Williamson slides the flat of her right hand quickly up and down her thigh to demonstrate the motion that twists the raw ends together in an entangled bond. As one fiber rib after another is added, the string grows in length, snaking to the ground and piling up into a coil.
Hand-spun palm-fiber string is so strong that it is used by the Tukano to weave hammocks (each requires a mile of twine) and purses, to make bowstrings, and to tie feathers securely to headdresses. This kind of string is a cultural marker for anthropologists, something that separates South American forest peoples from their neighbors on the open plains to the south. The more southerly cultures make their string from animal sinew, but forest dwellers prefer palm and other vegetation because it's abundant and serviceable.
Across South America, fiber string is traditionally made not only from palms but also from sedges, succulent plants, cotton, and even a wild relative of the pineapple. This pineapple string can be spun fine enough to be used for necklaces and bracelets. String made by people living at higher elevations also incorporates alpaca and vicuna hair and sometimes human hair.
The making and use of plant-fiber string is of course not restricted to Amazonia. The Inca, who had no written language, used the quipu--a device made of a series of strings with colored knots--to record census findings and tallies of animal herds and other resources. The Chinese, with a string vocabulary of more than a dozen different knots, have used macrame cord since antiquity to fasten and wrap things and also to record events and to fashion distinctive patterns. The Eskimos were enthusiastic practitioners of string games like cat's cradle, while the Polynesians had a tradition of using string maps for navigating from island to island.
The people of Kiribati, an island nation in the western Pacific, use technology similar to that of the Tukano, according to anthropologist Bernd Lambert, of Cornell University, who has been observing the Kiribati, including their string making, since the 1950s. He has collected various wooden and shark-tooth weapons that are tied together by twists of fiber interlaced with human hair. In the Gilbert Islands, string making is integral to understanding the division of labor. "Women make the flexible items, like Cordage, and men work with the harder materials, such as wood," Lambert explains. Women, according to Lambert, appear to be spinning string all the time, and they produce so much that they often roll it into large balls and store it for later use.
"These people are always going to need cordage," he says. "They use it to tie houses together--even huge meeting houses--and to make canoes, not to mention making small items such as belts and fishing nets. They need a lot of it." Today, even though they have access to machine-made nylon or cotton string, the people of Kiribati prefer handmade cord. "When tying canoe planks together, they use coconut fiber because it swells up and plugs the holes. It's cheap and does the job well, sometimes even better than the modern alternatives."
It seems that people all over the world have been making string for a very long time. From impressions of fiber cordage on fired clay, archaeologists have discovered evidence of string and of rope-making technology in Europe that dates back 28,000 years. In southern France, Paleolithic peoples used rope to climb into the cave of Lascaux. And since string is highly perishable, the evidence we have of it in the archaeological record probably only hints at its actual uses. Our ancestors may have spun string long before our earliest record of it.
In modern Western societies, string is fading into memory. We used to carry baked goods home in pink boxes tied with string, and our mail often came held together with twine. These days, string has been set aside in favor of nifty plastic packaging, Velcro, and duct tape. Our headgear, hammocks, and purses are made of other materials and in faraway countries. In most households, at least one ball of twine still survives in the junk drawer, but when was the last time we needed it?
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