Analysis of textiles found at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyuk revealed that they were made of oak fibers, not linen.
The site of Çatalhöyuk, Turkey, photographed on June 16, 2018.
This article is taken from Science et Avenir - La recherche n°899, dated January 2022.
8,700 years ago, the oldest textiles used at the famous Neolithic site of Çatalhöyuk, Turkey, would have been made of oak bast fibers rather than linen as previously thought, according to a study in the journal Antiquity , in October 2021. Science and Future questioned Christophe Moulherat, expert in ancient textiles and lecturer at Sorbonne University-Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) on this subject.
Sciences et Avenir:What does this discovery reveal?
Christophe Moulherat: Since the 1960s, fragments of textiles have been found at Çatalhöyuk. First identified as wool for the oldest, and later flax, recent analyzes have shown that it was in fact oak bast (fiber from the bark).
Are these the oldest "textiles" in the world?
It is already necessary to define what one qualifies as "textile". If we think of "esparto", objects made, winnowed or woven in vegetable fibers, we can go back to ages of 12,000 years in America, and 30,000 years in Europe. On the other hand, for textiles made from looms, Çatalhöyuk remains a strong candidate.
Has there been a production order of these materials over time?
The oldest weavings were made from bast willow, lime or other. When flax was used around 6000 BC in the Near East, it was no longer tree bark, but always plant fibers from stems. The earliest known cotton remains date from the sixth millennium BC in Pakistan. The spinning of wool linked to animal domestication appeared rather around 4000 BC.