'Trollen' braid weaving...

[Dru Durman]

Hey all!

Just been doing a school visit with my Dark Age group and teaching the kids how to weave braids with a trollen wheel, which also happened to be the first time I've ever done it. I find it really easy and might use it to replace the waistband cord holding up my braccae, decorate hems etc..

HOWEVER!

I don't know when the technique started, so wouldn't want to be using and displaying a weaving technique that wasn't in use during the Iron Age. Does anyone here know one way or another? Thought someone on here would be able to help...

[Becky Watkins Tien]

The very little I know about it suggests it's similar to Japanese kumihimo, which seems discouraging. However, Elizabeth Barber found this type of cord among the textiles of the Tarim Basin mummies, and she also discusses Greek implements similar to marudais. These implements were a bit of a mystery until kumihimo was suggested. This type of cord would match the smooth round belts I've seen on some Greek female statues.

For Britain? Hmmm... not sure. Kumihimo has been in Japan since the 6th/7th century CE and is associated with the spread of Buddhism. Not quite what you're looking for. I can check my Mummies of Urumchi book when I go back to California next week and see what I can dig up about the Greek stuff if you think that might help.

[Becky Watkins Tien]

Here's Barber's abstract for her presentation at the 2002 Textile Society of America symposium:

http://textilesociety.org/abstracts_2002/Barber.htm

"Ribbons Around the Silk Road--Before Silk
(Toward a Pre-History of Band Weaving)
by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Magnificently preserved samples of multistrand, polychrome oblique plaiting and kumihimo-type cords have been excavated from the salty sands of the Tarim Basin, along the route of the later "Silk Road." The earliest of these, from Loulan, Cherchen, Hami, and Sampula, precede the Chinese entry into the region--which occurred in 110 BCE--by centuries and even millennia. Evidence suggests that seminomadic Caucasoid (and probably Indo-European) herders used the wool from their sheep to produce these colorful bands while on the move, sharing their techniques the length of Eurasia. Related evidence turns up in prehistoric Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans at one end, and in Japan and Korea at the other.

This paper presents the above evidence, then explores the possible relations of the early Eurasian plaiting tradition to a peculiar trait of later Persian silk fabrics and to the earliest known weaving in Europe and Turkey. Sites in these western areas provide tantalizing bits of evidence for tools and techniques of band-weaving and -plaiting, as well as occasional fragments of fabrics and painted representations, all of which have become much easier to interpret as a result of the Central Asian finds. It now appears that Europe had a much earlier acquaintance with fancy plaiting than formerly assumed, and also, possibly, with the rigid heddle. These conclusions are supported additionally by the surprisingly large number of separate terms for bands and band-makers recorded in the earliest readable European texts: the economic documents of Bronze Age Greece."

Still not much help for Britain.