Elizabeth Wayland Barber & The Age of String

Summary

Haptic & Hue: Episode Summary – Elizabeth Wayland Barber & The Age of String

Introduction

In this captivating episode of Haptic & Hue's Tales of Textiles, host Jo Andrews delves into the profound contributions of Elizabeth Wayland Barber, a pioneering figure in textile archaeology. The episode, titled "Elizabeth Wayland Barber & The Age of String," explores Barber's groundbreaking work that redefined our understanding of ancient textiles and their central role in human civilization. Released on September 5, 2024, this episode commemorates the 30th anniversary reissue of Barber's influential book, Women's Work the First 20,000 Years.

Early Life and Influences

Elizabeth Wayland Barber's journey into the world of textiles and archaeology began in her childhood, deeply influenced by her family's background and her early experiences with weaving. As Jo Andrews narrates, Barber’s mother taught home economics and weaving during the challenging times of World War II, fostering a hands-on connection with textiles from a young age.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber [00:22]: "I have a sister. My earliest years were during the war and we didn't have much. And so mom made all our clothes... I still have it and still use it."

Barber’s father, a physicist, instilled in her a love for the sciences and problem-solving. This dual influence of practical textile skills and scientific inquiry set the stage for her unique interdisciplinary approach.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber [06:03]: "Never mind the discipline, just follow the problem."

A pivotal moment came during a family trip to Europe when Barber developed a fervent interest in archaeology, a field that seamlessly integrated her passions for science and textiles.

Academic Journey

Barber pursued her academic interests at Bryn Mawr, majoring in archaeology and classical Greek, complemented by geology. Her academic prowess extended to Yale, where she completed a Ph.D. in linguistics, a decision that would later prove invaluable in her archaeological research.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber [16:22]: "The bibliography in Prehistoric Textiles is in 25 languages. And that's only because I was able to do it. Because I had the PhD in linguistics."

Despite facing gender-based barriers, such as Princeton’s refusal to hire women for teaching positions in the 1960s, Barber persisted. She secured a part-time teaching role at Occidental College, where she began her seminal work on ancient textiles.

Writing Prehistoric Textiles

Barber’s first major publication, Archaeological Decipherment, showcased her expertise in linguistics and archaeology. However, it was her subsequent work, Prehistoric Textiles, that marked a turning point in the field.

Initially underestimating the scope of her project, Barber intended to produce a modest 10-page paper. Instead, her research expanded into a comprehensive 60-page monograph over 17 years, culminating in a book that would challenge and eventually transform archaeological perspectives on textiles.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber [12:01]: "I could look for a particular site where I knew there were textile remains... it took Elizabeth 17 years to research her great academic book, Prehistoric Textiles."

In Prehistoric Textiles, Barber argued that textiles were not merely byproducts of ancient societies but were central to their development. She demonstrated that ancient fibers and weaving techniques were far more sophisticated than previously acknowledged, pushing the origins of textiles back to 20,000 BCE.

Challenges and Impact

Upon its release in 1991, Prehistoric Textiles was met with initial silence in the United States. The American Journal of Archaeology did not review it, reflecting the academic community's unpreparedness for its revolutionary ideas.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber [22:31]: "When it came out, nobody knew what to do with it in this country... It was too different, it was too new."

However, the book gradually gained recognition, igniting interest among archaeologists and leading to increased awareness and subsequent discoveries. Barber's work laid the foundation for understanding textiles' vital role in human history, inspiring others to seek out and recognize textile evidence in archaeological sites.

Writing Women's Work the First 20,000 Years

Encouraged by the impact of her lectures based on Prehistoric Textiles, Barber embarked on writing Women's Work the First 20,000 Years. Coalescing her extensive research with a narrative approach, this book targeted a broader audience, including women's studies courses and general readers interested in early women's history.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber [24:47]: "I wanted to show people that ancient textiles were much more elaborate than they are thinking they were."

Published under the name E.J.W. Barber to obscure her gender and combat biases in academia, the book initially struggled to gain attention. Despite this, it eventually became a classic in the field, empowering a new generation of archaeologists to explore and value textile artifacts.

Legacy and Continuing Influence

Elizabeth Wayland Barber's contributions extend beyond her publications. She fostered a community of textile archaeologists, particularly women, who recognized the significance of textiles in understanding ancient societies. Her work not only shifted academic focus but also validated the role of women in the creation and advancement of textiles throughout history.

A landmark moment occurred in 2014 when Barber attended a conference in Hallstatt, Austria, discovering a thriving community of female textile archaeologists who credited her work with inspiring their careers. This recognition underscored her role as a guiding spirit in the field.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber [30:34]: "I about cried. You know, this was so wonderful because I never get any feedback because I was teaching in a tiny little college..."

Barber’s research continues to influence ongoing discoveries, with recent finds pushing the origins of textiles back even further. Her foresight and dedication have made ancient textiles a respected and essential aspect of archaeological study.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber [29:57]: "We're discovering that the before is a lot before than we thought... there's this find in northern France of deliberately made string. Neanderthal."

Conclusion

Elizabeth Wayland Barber's journey from a childhood immersed in weaving to becoming a trailblazing textile archaeologist exemplifies the profound impact that dedicated research and interdisciplinary approaches can have on our understanding of human history. Her books, Prehistoric Textiles and Women's Work the First 20,000 Years, remain seminal works that continue to inspire and guide scholars in the field. Through her unwavering commitment, Barber has ensured that textiles are recognized not just as utilitarian objects but as fundamental elements that shaped human societies across millennia.

For more insights and to take advantage of the 20% discount on the new edition of Women's Work the First 20,000 Years, visit www.hapticandhue.com.

Transcript

[Jo Andrews]

It's not often that a book about textiles changes how we think about the world. But Elizabeth Whalen Barber's book, Women's The First 20,000 Years, did just that. It came out in 1994. I read it shortly afterwards. I was learning to weave at the time and I remember consuming it from COVID to cover. What she said was made instinctive sense. It combined tremendous life experience and scholarship. Not just her own experience of archaeology, but also linguistics, mythology, anthropology, literature, and, of course, her practical experience of being a weaver. For me, it was as though someone had just switched the lights on. Instead of seeing textiles as a byproduct of human society, something that the Egyptians had probably invented just 5 to 6,000 years ago, Weylun Baba put them at the heart of human experience and said that the creation of fiber and complex fabric was much, much of and was fundamental to the development of human society. She said it was principally an activity of women, and if you wanted to understand how societies formed, it was important to study textiles properly. The book was a bestseller, but behind the story of its success lay a grueling struggle for funds in the face of ridicule that there might be anything at all to say about ancient textiles.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

They thought it was crazy because they thought there was nothing there, so everybody thought there was nothing to say. But I knew there was lots to say. I didn't know there was as much that was going to turn out to be.

[Jo Andrews]

Welcome back to Haptic and Hughes Tales of Textiles after the summer break and a special welcome to all our new listeners. I'm Jo Andrews, a hand weaver interested in the stories textiles tell us and the often hidden hands that fashion fibre and cloth into something useful and beautiful. These tales always have something new to tell us about ourselves and cast a fresh light on our families and communities. In this episode, we celebrate one of the great figures of the textile world and track how Elizabeth Wayland Barber came to write her book Women's Work and the tremendous impact it has had on what we know about textiles and fiber. The book has just been reissued to mark the 30th anniversary of its publication in this month's Haptic and Hugh newsletter, and on the webpage for this episode, there's a discount code for those in North America who would like 20% off the price of the new edition. It's one of the great privileges of Haptic and Hue that we get to talk to some incredible people. None more so for me than Dr. Baba, who's now in her 80s and living in Utah. The tale of how she became the first person to construct a comprehensive narrative about how central fiber and cloth are to human development. Is a story that takes us right back to her own early childhood.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

My mother taught home economics before World War II. And one of the things she taught was weaving. And so she had a loom. And when we kids came along, we girls. I have a sister. My earliest years were during the war and we didn't have much. And so mom made all our clothes. And I pulled this out. I made this when I was four with my mother and my grandmother's help. And it's a needle case which I still use. And they made it out of little scraps. The flowers are very tiny scraps of felt and a little bit of lace which probably came off of somebody's underwear. And I still have it and still use it. So that's how far back I go with actually being directly involved with textiles. But by the time I was 8, I know I was using the little table loom. And a rainy Saturday morning was made more interesting by getting Mama to open her cedar chest and show us the textiles that she had and tell us the stories, where they came from and so forth. So I was textiles up to here.

[Jo Andrews]

That was one side of her childhood. But something just as important came from her father.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

My dad was a physicist, teaching math to engineers and doing research in blood flow. And he always used to say, never mind the discipline, just follow the problem. When I was in fifth grade, if he'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said, I want to be a chemist and a physicist and a geologist. I named all the sciences because I was steeped in them. When I was in seventh grade, my dad got moved to the basement of the geology department temporarily while they built a new engineering building. And so when I had to wait for him and Mama to go home, I would go up to the top floor where they had all the dinosaur bones. And my seventh grade homeroom teacher said to me, I understand you're interested in fossils. And so here's a book on fossil people. Well, it wasn't. It was Bronze Age archeology. And I was hooked.

[Jo Andrews]

She says she was hooked because archaeology was something that used all the sciences. Then when she was 13, her father got a year long placement at the University of Strasbourg in France. This was a chance for the family to travel to Europe.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

My parents said to me and my sister before we left, we want each of you to pick a topic on which you will inform the family wherever we go. And this is to keep us from being in the back seat saying, are we there each at. I picked archaeology. I dragged my poor family to Viking fortresses in Scandinavia and Pompei, everything in between. And when we went to Paris, towards the end of the trip, we had four days in Paris, and I spent three of them in the Louvre. And finally, my mom sort of picked me up by the scruff of the neck and said, you are not spending the fourth day in Paris in the Louvre. So by that time, by the time I got home, I was hardwired as an archaeologist.

[Jo Andrews]

At the same time, the two sisters were noticing the differences and the similarities between the different European languages.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

And the other thing my sister and I were doing in the backseat was learning the numbers from 1 to 10 and how to say hello and please and thank you in every language whose borders we crossed. Because Papa spent the whole spring and summer visiting laboratories all over Western Europe. We kept saying, why is the Italian more like the French, but the Scandinavian is more like the German and the Germans more like the English and so forth.

[Jo Andrews]

This created another interest, early languages. And when Dr. Barber was applying to college, linear B, the Minoan script used on Crete, had just been deciphered.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

So I was fascinated by the languages, the early languages. So I went to Bryn Mawr, where I could major in both archaeology and classical Greek, which I did, and took geology. And, you know, I'd already taken physics and chemistry in high school and written my term papers on things like infrared photography and radio carbon dating. Okay, so here I am taking. Well, I was particularly interested in Aegean archaeology, but I had to take Egyptian and Aegean and Mesopotamian and all this. And I'm looking at these wall paintings, and I'm saying, that's a typical weaving design that must have been copied off of a textile, because, of course, I've been weaving since I was a kid. Okay? And they'd say, oh, they could have made stuff like that back then. I think I could have done that when I was 8.

[Jo Andrews]

So here's what's special about Elizabeth Whand Barber. She is this incredible academic with all the sciences to her name, and yet she's also a weaver who knows a practical weave design when she sees it.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

So I finished my undergraduate degree, went to Yale to study Hittite, and my professor decided to retire early. So I moved into the linguistics department, finished my PhD in linguistics, did both historical and structural. They said, well, we're about to split. You should choose between historical instructional. I said, no, I need both. I need historical to understand the ancient language and I need structural to work on decipherment.

[Jo Andrews]

She turned her PhD into a book called Archaeological Decipherment. And then this brilliant young academic hit a problem. She should have walked into a good job, but no.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

My husband was teaching at Princeton, which didn't hire women. This was in the 60s.

[Jo Andrews]

They didn't hire women at all?

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

No. Not for teaching, no.

[Jo Andrews]

And so Princeton lost one of the most original thinkers of her generation. And the Barbers moved back to California, where they were both from. Elizabeth found a half time job teaching linguistics at Occidental College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

And my husband looks at me and says, now what are you going to do? And I said, well, I have this little project. He's never forgiven me for the word little. I said, I want to show people that ancient textiles were much more elaborate than they are thinking they were.

[Jo Andrews]

So she took herself back to the library and started looking at all the references she could find.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

So I went back to Bryn Mawr for a week where the head of the archaeology department had really upset all the librarians. She had gotten all the books on archaeological stuff and put them all into the seminar room, filed by site and date, not by Dewey Decimal or whatever it was they used. So I went back for a week and I knew that I could look, look for a particular site where I knew there were textile remains or whatever and everything would be within inches of my hand. And then I found a friend of mine was now teaching there and he was a weaver. When he heard what I was doing, he kept saying, I once thought I would try to work on some of this stuff, but I know I'm never going to have time. I'm going to bring you all my references. So at the time I went home, I said to my husband, this is not going to be a little 10 page paper. This is going to be at least a 60 page monograph.

[Jo Andrews]

And that too was a wild underestimate. It took Elizabeth 17 years to research her great academic book, Prehistoric Textiles. Seventeen years in which the barbers lived very frugally. Elizabeth had a part time teaching job. Paul worked as a piano tuner. And she managed to get the odd grant to travel in the summers to museums and libraries. She began piece by piece to put together the evidence to show that fiber and weaving was much older than people thought, that it wasn't simply plain weave, that ancient peoples enjoyed and valued dyed cloth and had considerable skills in creating far more complex fabric than had been imagined.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

Now, probably the key point in that is that everybody had told Me that everybody wore plain white back then because the Egyptian clothing is, until very late in the 18th Dynasty is always plain white. Well, when I eventually got a Guggenheim to go to Europe for three months and go to all over the place, all the museums that had the major collection. And the third from last was Cairo and Paul had joined me in the Balkans because he thought I needed a bodyguard for the Balkans in Egypt. And we get to Egypt and we discovered that every night you would wash out your clothing in the wash basin. And you know, there's a White Nile and a Blue Nile, there's a third Nile, there's a Black Nile, which is what comes out of your clothes when you watch them because it is so hot and dusty. And that's when I realized they were wearing white linen because they wanted to wash it all the time. And they put color on with that gorgeous jewelry that nobody else has that much of. So that was why, since Egypt was the only place where whole sets of clothing and so forth survived, all the archaeologists assumed everybody else wore plain white. But the Egyptians were wearing linen, which is hard to dye, and everybody else was making wool, which is easy to dye and comes in a bunch of natural colors anyway. And so I had to break through that barrier. When I had started and thought it was going to be a 10 page paper, I felt there's so much, there are spindle worlds, loom weights. I know there's, you know, representations of looms in Egypt and so forth. And I could at least demonstrate that they were capable of making fancier cloth. But once I got into it, I found there was far more data than that.

[Jo Andrews]

And here's where that fascination with languages that began in the backseat of her parents car traversing European borders and comparing languages with her sister finally paid off.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

And I have always blessed the fact that I took the extra two years to get the PhD in linguistics because I use linguistics every day. As I always say to my students, always said to my archaeology students, ancient cultures did not honor modern political boundaries. If you're following a problem, as my dad always said, you may go across five countries, each of which speaks a different language. And you gotta be able to read all those excavation reports. So the bibliography in prehistoric textiles is in 25 languages. And that's only because I was able to do it. Because I had the PhD in linguistics.

[Jo Andrews]

She was also able to visit the generation of textile experts who came before her who specialized in specific areas. People like the Crowfoot family in Britain whose mother Grace, had studied Egyptian and Sudanese textiles. Elizabeth Munchgaard the expert on the textiles of the Danish bog bodies, and Hans Jurgen Hund, the man who first catalogued the incredible Bronze and Iron Age textiles found in the Austrian Hallstatt salt mines.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

But other than that, all I ever found was a footnote, or it was usually not, in the index of whatever excavation report I looked at. I just shelf browsed endlessly shelf browsed. I got on the lecture circuit for the Archaeological Institute of America so that I could go to different universities and give talks. And every one of them I read ahead and say, can I spend three hours in your library? These are some of the things I'm looking for. We didn't have interlibrary loan back then.

[Jo Andrews]

A key breakthrough that allowed Dr. Barber to push back the date of textiles to 20,000 BCE was her understanding of how cloth developed out of string and fiber.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

When I started, people said textiles didn't go back probably more than about 5,000 years, or 5,000 BC at the earliest. One of the ways I pushed it back to 20,000 BC was the Paleolithic figurines with the string skirts. And so I had my eyes out for looking for string skirts, because my biggest hobby ever since I was like 6 years old is folk dancing and European folk dancing and costumes. And so it was a Saturday night, and I was just finishing the last proofs of prehistoric textiles. And I finished them by supper time. And I said to Paul, they're having a folk dance concert at Pasadena Civic Auditorium this evening. I'm going to go and see if I can catch a ticket. And so I did. And it was from Serbia. It was a Serbian group. And the beginning of the second act, according to program notes, this work going to be a suite of dances by the V, who live on the eastern side way up in the mountains. And part of them are in Romanian, part of them are in. In. In Bulgaria is right on that border, and it's way up in the mountains. And they said, and the costume for this is particularly archaic. Okay, curtain opens out the comet string skirts. And I'm like, oh, my God. And I did a hand drawing of that and got it into the thing. It's not a very good drawing, but it shows that I've done from a rather hazy photograph in the program. And so I got that into prehistoric textiles as it's still with us.

[Jo Andrews]

She was looking at relics from the deep past that was still with us today. Items that, for her meant that it would have been better to have called the Paleolithic, not the Stone Age, but the age of string.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

I Mean, the Stone Age was so set by the Scandinavian archaeologists who first tried to find some way back in the 19th century of setting up some kind of grid for. For what they were finding. Said, well, we've got the Stone Age and then we've got the Bronze Age, and then we've got the Iron Age, and it doesn't work very well. But there is a logical progression there. But for the women, it was the age of string and better yet, of fiber. And all the things could be done with fiber.

[Jo Andrews]

After 17 years of work, Prehistoric Textiles was finally published in 1991. But even then, she took great care to disguise her gender, publishing it simply under the name E.J.W. barber.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

So I had already used E.J.W. barber when I wrote Archaeological Decipherment because I knew that men didn't think a woman had any business doing all that linguistics and mathematics. And the reviews came out, Barber, he they fell for it. They assumed with the three initials that I was some British esquire. So I did the same thing for this one and the girls at Princeton, both times, because Princeton did both those books, wrote the dust jacket copy with no pronouns so slickly that you don't notice there aren't any pronouns. They did that with great glee.

[Jo Andrews]

This was a groundbreaking book, and even now it's still a classic for textile archaeologists. But in 1991, in America, it was greeted with silence.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

So when it came out, nobody knew what to do with it in this country. Aja, American Journal of Archaeology that reviewed it. Archaeology never reviewed it, Nobody ever looked at it. But I think they didn't know what to do with it. Nobody else had ever done this before. So then who do you send the review to? Finally, Mary Elizabeth King wrote a long review for I forget what journal it was that did American Archaeology and said, this is what we need to be doing for the ancient textiles of the Americas. And that was like a 12 page, you know, review article. And that was the only real review it got in this country.

[Jo Andrews]

But despite the lack of recognition, the book had a big impact. It opened people's eyes to the fact that a lot of what they were seeing on archaeological digs and in museums might be related to textiles.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

But within two years, I would be walking down the corridor at Archaeological Institute of America annual meetings and then become running down the Dr. Barber, Dr. Barber, would you look at my photographs? Are these textile tools? And so people were starting to become aware of it, but nobody ever reviewed it. It was too different, it was too new. But it has become the book that everybody Goes to, and it's way out of date, but it gives you the beginning. It gives you the beginnings.

[Jo Andrews]

And she began to give lectures based on the book.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

And I was doing lecture tours and so forth. And Paul said to me, when are you going to write the other book? And I said, what other book? And he said, well, every time you give a lecture, what people ask you about is to tell them more about what you've said about the women who were doing this work.

[Jo Andrews]

Paul Barber came up with the title Women's work the first 20,000 years. The publishers, Norton, loved the title so much, they gave her a contract. And Elizabeth began to write, this time for a less academic audience.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

A lot of the reason I wrote it was I was getting upset at all the pie in the sky possible Women's history, that was complete fiction that people were purveying as Women's Early History. And so I aimed it at the women's studies courses. College freshmen, sophomores type thing.

[Jo Andrews]

So what she had to do now was to stop being an academic and to start writing stories.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

Head of nonfiction at Norton, edited my book, and we had some little rows about things. But he was very good. I really learned a lot from him about how he'd say, you're getting too academic here. You got to lighten this up. And the famous one was in the Paleolithic chapter. He says, I need more stories here. I think, how do I come up with stories for the Paleolithic?

[Jo Andrews]

One of the things that helped her do that was her childhood practice of weaving. Her knowledge of textiles is anchored in the practical experience of it.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

That's right. And I. I keep saying, you know, I decide to try to make a reweaving of thus and such a piece and say it was a belt or an edge band that I'd see over and over again on the frescoes, like the Mycenaean frescoes. Okay, so here I am, you know, I've tied the end of my Might have a string to my lamppost. And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, you know, I could get my book done a lot faster if I'd spend my time on it writing instead of doing this. And then I'd get an aha. And I'd realize what they had done and why they'd done it. It was the only way to do it is to actually take all that time to try to repeat it.

[Jo Andrews]

And that's the difference between Elizabeth Wayland Barber and the other academics of her generation. She created a book that has stood the test of time because she was both a doer and a thinker, although the academic in her was ambivalent at the time.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

Well, to be perfectly honest, when I wrote it, I felt that compared to Prehistoric Textiles and the previous book, Archaeological Decipherment, that it was kind of a piece of fluff. But in rereading it and seeing the impact that it had, I realized I did it right. And it did have impact, and it did make people stop and think we know more about early women than we thought we did.

[Jo Andrews]

But it did something else just as important. The two books, Women's Work and Prehistoric Textiles, created a context in which other archaeologists could begin to look for the evidence that Dr. Baba was writing about. One of the sites she originally wrote about was Dolny Vestenich in the Czech Republic, where they had pieces of pottery dating back to 25,000 years BC and.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

I looked all through that publication, hoping that they would show a piece of clay that had a bit of impression of string or textile on it. Couldn't find it, But I mentioned it. And many years later, in the mid-90s, they reopened that site. And a friend of mine in Illinois was asked, who was an archaeologist and is of Ukrainian background, she was asked to come and work on it. And she knew what I'd said about that site. And she looked through 10,000 pieces of broken pottery. They were mostly figurines. And she found about 25 pieces that had impressions of string and textiles. And it turned out the textiles were not only twined, but there was at least one piece of true weave represented 25,000 B.C. okay, so she publishes all this stuff. And then my friends at ucla, who, of course had heard me talk quite a lot, were excavating in Georgia, and they found remnants of string of three or four different colors from 30,000 BC in a cave. See, now people are looking for it, especially if they're women on the team.

[Jo Andrews]

Thirty years on, she regrets not calling the book Women's work the first 30,000 years, as now the dates of the first textiles and fibers have been pushed back so much further. In particular, Dr. Barber says there's been a find in France that dates back at least 55,000 years before the present.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

We're discovering that the before is a lot before than we thought. Just recently, there's this find in northern France of deliberately made string. Neanderthal. Well. And as I said, in Prehistoric Textiles and probably again in women's work, by 20,000 B.C. they were already so good at it that it had to have a much earlier history.

[Jo Andrews]

In around 2014. Dr. Barber was invited to a conference about ancient textiles at Hallstatt in Austria.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

Most of the people giving papers were women on ancient textiles. Not all of them, but most of them. And as they discovered who I was, they would come up to me and said, thank you for having written your books, because I was interested in archaeology, but I stones and bones just didn't do it for me. And then I discovered archaeological textiles. So here was his entire lecture room full of European women working on ancient textiles. And I about cried. You know, this was so wonderful because I never get any feedback because I was teaching in a tiny little college way often, you know, about as far from Europe as it could be and so forth. So it was just amazing to see all these women who had discovered archaeological textiles, and it was the kind of archaeology they wanted to do.

[Jo Andrews]

There's no doubt that Elizabeth Wayland Barber is the guiding spirit of a whole new generation of archaeologists who understand how important textiles are and just how much they have to tell us about the skills our ancestors had and the contribution they made to our societies. Because of her work, ancient textiles are no longer discarded as worthless. And now we know that humans like us have been creating string, fiber and cloth for thousands and thousands of years, and that they have served humanity incredibly well in a myriad of ways.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

Well, as one of my friends always said, if your work's your play, you got it made. If you enjoy making cloth, if you enjoy weaving, embroidering, whatever, if you really enjoy working with textiles, then it's wonderful. I mean, it's like the women were saying to me, they didn't like stones and bones, but they did like textiles. So now they've got this wonderful career, and I think that's the way it is. You have to go where your love is.

[Jo Andrews]

Thank you to Elizabeth Whalen Barber for her time and wisdom in telling us the story of how she wrote Women's work the first 20,000 years. You can find out more about this episode and get details of the discount of the new edition of women's work at www.hapticandhue.com. listen-series-Haptic and Hue is hosted by me, Jo Andrews, and edited and produced by Bill Taylor. It's an independent production supported by its listeners who bring us ideas and generously fund us via Buy Me a Coffee or by becoming a friend of Haptic and Hu. This keeps the podcast free from any advertising and sponsorship. It also brings you something extra every month with a separate podcast called Travels With Textiles, hosted by Bill Taylor and me, where we cover a whole range of different textile news and topics. This month's new episode has details of a special exhibition in New York on real clothes and real life. This is not couture, but something very far from it. Look at the clothes that women actually Wore in the 19th and 20th centuries. We'll also have an interview with actor Corll on her new book about India's beloved Cantha Cloth. You can find out more about Friends of Haptic and [e-mail]. join we'll be back next month with a brand new podcast, but until then, enjoy your making.

[Elizabeth Wayland Barber]

SA.