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I don't think metals technology was significantly more advanced than textiles technology. Turning plants into good quality fabrics is a complicated process with
by mrob 7y ago
I don't think metals technology was significantly more advanced than textiles technology. Turning plants into good quality fabrics is a complicated process with non-obvious steps. E.g. retting (controlled partial rotting of plants to aid removal of the bast fibers) is IMO something non-intuitive, just like smelting of metals.
But textiles technology gave only small incremental improvements with each step. Plant-based fabrics were more convenient than animal skins, but they weren't something fundamentally new. Metals however could be used to make things completely impossible with older technologies, so they're a better candidate for naming time periods.
- bluGill 7y agoI don't think so. Retting isn't obvious, but it isn't hard to imagine that someone encountered some material that wasn't preserved and it rotted in the right way. This could be accidentally finding it, or storing some for latter processing and then dieing - only latter was the cache discovered and used.
- ncmncm 7y agoIt is one thing for somebody to notice and use such fibers, and completely another for the practice to become part of the material culture. Archaeology is concerned with the latter. How a practice entered the material culture is an interesting detail.