“In the past, researchers largely neglected the possibility that the fabric fibres could be anything other than wool or linen, but lately another material has received more attention,” Bender Jørgensen says.
People in Çatalhöyük used assorted varieties of exactly this material.
“Bast fibres were used for thousands of years to make rope, thread, and in turn also yarn and cloth,” says Bender Jørgensen.
A fibre sample from a basket turned out to be made of grass, but several of the textiles are clearly made of bast fibre from oak trees. They are also the oldest preserved woven fabrics in the world.
Bast fibre is found between the bark and the wood in trees such as willow, oak or linden. The people from Catalhöyük used oak bark, and thus fashioned their clothes from the bark of trees that they found in their surroundings. They also used oak timber as a building material for their homes, and people undoubtedly harvested the bast fibres when trees were felled.
Antoinette Rast-Eicher et al, The use of local fibres for textiles at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Antiquity (2021). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.89
Woven textiles from Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia are among the earliest-known examples of weaving in the Near East and Europe. Studies of material excavated in the 1960s identified the fibres as flax. New scanning electron microscope analysis, however, shows these fibres—and others from more recent excavations at the site—to be made from locally sourced oak bast. This result is consistent with the near absence of flax seeds at Çatalhöyük, and suggests there was no need for the importation of fibres from elsewhere; it also questions the date at which domesticated flax was first used for fibres. These findings shed new light on early textile production in the Neolithic, suggesting that tree bast played a more significant role than previously recognised.
