Process and Tools

As inhabitants of a small agricultural community, people in Karanis would have produced most of their own textiles, as shown by the textile-working tools and material in various stages of being processed found.

While these shears are too small to ever come near a live sheep, bigger ones would have been used to remove the raw wool, which would have formed masses like the first sample.

The squares of sheepskin still attached to the wool fibers are unusual; these were probably cuttings from a larger pelt. It is not necessary to skin a sheep to get wool, and it wasn't common, as sheep were the main source for textile fibers.

Fibers were usually dyed with dyes made from local plants and minerals. As of yet, no evidence of carding (cleaning and organizing the fibers with two paddles studded with wire pins - essentially brushing it!) has been found; washed wool just was plucked apart manually before the spinning process.

The basic tools for spinning are very simple and were not elaborated upon until the 11th/12th century. A spindle has two parts, the shaft and the whorl, but it’s really just a large toy top. It is designed to spin quickly and for long periods of time; the whorl acts as a flywheel to increase momentum, and the shaft provides an easy way to restart the spinning and increases stability. The force of the spin is then translated to the fibers attached to it, creating yarn.

The spinner, holding the fibers in her left hand, would draw out a tendril, then spin it with her fingers until it took on some form. Once she had a sizeable starter, she would attach it to her spindle, then spin that (typically down her thigh, for extra force) and let it hang, spinning, while feeding it more fibers. When the spinner had spun a large amount, and the spindle was in danger of reaching the floor, she would stop the spindle, wind the yarn created around the shaft, then start the spindle spinning again.

It sounds like a laborious process, but a practiced spinner can do this nearly effortlessly and very quickly, with great mobility and easily - it was possible to spin standing up, sitting down, or walking around, and small children were probably doing it!

Spinning could create different kinds of yarns, too. The samples of cords here are made of multiple singles, spun together to create a thicker and more sturdy cord. Thread and yarn were necessary not just for textile production but also fishing nets, ropes, attachments, toys, tools, and many more uses.

But most of what was spun was made into fabric, and the main way to do that was to weave it! Warp-weighted looms were common throughout the ancient world, where the crossbeam is hung in the air and the warp threads (the ones stretching out vertically to the weaver) were tensioned by means of small loom weights which hung at the bottom. One such can be seen in the examples here. The weft (the yarn that interwove the warp horizontally) would have been wound onto a shuttle and then passed through the warp threads by the weaver.

That process was much facilitated by what’s called a heddle - a rod to which only certain warp threads are attached, so that when the heddle is lifted it creates a space through which the shuttle may pass. With ground looms (where the warp is stretched between two logs on the ground) heddle jacks, also found at the site, would have been used - to temporarily prop up the heddle rod, which could be knocked out and reset easily. A weaver's comb was used to tamp down the weft after a pass with the shuttle.

Depending on how the heddle was attached, different patterns of weaving could be made. The most common is a 1x1, plain or tabby weave, where each warp thread is crossed by one weft thread, over and under. Other commonly found ancient patterns were the basket weave (where two warp threads are crossed by two weft threads), or half-basket weave (where one thread is crossed by two of the other). Different stripes or patterns could also be created by using warp or weft threads of different colors.

The samples show a clear plain weave, with brown warp and blue weft, along with the remnants of some selvedge (self-edge) where the loom ended and the weft would have been directed back into the warp by the weaver at the end of each pass.