Wow, I can't believe my allergies this week. This has been almost like a cold. It finally let up a little this morning (great, just in time for me to start sorting the moldy old soil again). I had absolutely no energy last night - I knit a bit on the two pairs of "simple socks" but really had a hard time concentrating.

(And in case anyone's wondering: I told my chair about the student attempting to pick the lock and I am going to e-mail his departmental chair (he is from a different department) today. I don't want to get the guy in big big trouble over what was probably one of those "hey, look what I can do" Stupid Human Tricks, but I do think he might benefit from being talked to by someone scarier than I am)

So I'm going to talk a little about the other book I completed over Spring Break but never wrote about here. This was a book sent as a gift from a reader. It's really fascinating: "Women's work: the first 20,000 years" by Elizabeth Weyland Barber.

The book does talk some about ancient Greece and Egypt, but there's also lots of what you might call Proto-Indo-European stuff - that sort of dawn-of-civilization, we-still-don't-know-much-about-it-and-could-be-totally-wrong-after-all-look-at-what-Macauley-did-with-Motel-of-the-Mysteries stuff.

I find the really early stuff deeply interesting - it's partly the roots of who we are, but it's also so different. And yet, sometimes, it's possible to trace (or to try to trace, and recognize that the links are really tenuous) how some of those old beliefs and rituals came down to present day. One example is the idea of the "string skirt." Some of the early Venus statues were naked, except for a "skirt" of knotted string. And Bronze Age remains of a woman were found - again, she was (apparently) naked when laid to rest, save for a skirt of knotted string. Barber interprets these as fertility symbols: that a woman donned them when she had reached menarche but had not yet been "married off" (whatever form "marriage" took in those societies). Essentially, it was advertising: Hey, boys, I'm ready.

The thing is: some "recent" European folk costumes (particularly from places like Wallachia and Macedonia) feature heavily fringed aprons for the women. And Barber interprets that as a modern day survival of the old string skirt - maybe people would say that it meant something different now, or maybe the wearers of the dress wouldn't even be aware of the old meaning. But somehow, the thing survived, and was passed down, and maybe changed a bit in meaning over the years.

(This seems to be not-uncommon. From what I've read of some of the Morris dances in England, they are holdovers from old festivals in the spring - for the fertility of the earth - but now all the old ideas have been largely forgotten. And in Lark Rise to Candleford, they talk about the May Day festivities, which include carrying around a huge bouquet of flowers, with a china doll attached, called The Lady - and Flora Thompson speculates that The Lady was once (in earlier times) "Our Lady" (meaning Mary), and that she was a replacement of an earlier pagan goddess).

Barber also talks about the "hooked lonzenge" geometric figure that shows up again and again: it's another fertility symbol, or to put it politely, a "female" symbol (in that it resembles, very roughly, female genitalia).

(Fertility being much more important, I guess, to ancient societies than it is to ours. Or maybe we still have that stuff going around - all the subliminal sex in advertising - but we're just blind to it).

The book is mainly about spinning and weaving (knitting comes later,  and crochet comes MUCH later). One thing I found interesting were the different loom set-ups: in Egypt, they often used a flat loom that was low to the ground, where women would sit on the ground to weave. This worked because they could set it up in a courtyard and pretty well trust that it would not be rained upon. In wetter northern Europe, vertical looms were used (they were also apparently used in Greece), where the warp ran vertically and was held straight with clay weights (in some cases, it's only the weights that remain to attest that people wove in a particular habitation). She also notes that Penelope's fabled loom was probably more like a tapestry loom - weaving a tapestry, or pictured-cloth, is probably the only way she could have justified all the time it was taking (when she was ripping back at night, to avoid having to choose one of the "suitors," knowing her Odysseus would return).

One thing Barber notes is that doing an archaeology of things like spinning and weaving can be difficult. For one thing, fiber does not generally preserve well. For another, at least in earlier archeological days, some of the findings were discarded (loom weights can look like rather indistinct lumps of clay). One thing she used - which I found interesting, as I've taken some linguistics classes, back in my undergrad days - is using comparative linguistics to see how "old" words are for different spinning or weaving processes: are they similar across all Indo-European languages, suggesting a common origin (what biologists would call "homology"), or do they differ and represent a later development ("analogy"). Another thing she did - and this is the opener for the book - is that in some cases she (or other researchers she writes about) actually TRIED OUT the methods they were contemplating: trying to spin flax, for example, or, as in Barber's case, trying to weave a small piece of plaid cloth to match one fount in the Halstatt salt mines. And she talks of what she learned from that process.

And that seems to make a lot of sense to me: learning how people did something by trying to do it yourself. Seeing what mistakes you make (Barber mis-warped the loom; she used the weft pattern for the warp). Seeing if there is an "easier" way of getting to the desired end. And then, of course, the idea that you are kind of "feeling" what someone felt hundreds (or, in Barber's case, thousands) of years ago.

Actually, that's one reason why I knit and crochet and quilt: I've said it before. I like that idea of a connection with the past. (And also, I suppose, playing the piano could count too: how many people, over the past couple hundred years, have picked out Beethoven's "Ecossaise in G" as part of their instruction? How many young ladies in households played that to entertain themselves - or someone else?)

Anyway: it's a really interesting book. It's written in such a way that it moves fast, it kept me engaged in it. And it's full of interesting small facts about spinning, weaving, and ancient cultures. I really enjoyed it.