African clothing history: An Egyptian painting of Nubians (from modern Sudan), about 1300 BC Weaving comes to Africa By about 2500 BC, some people in Africa started to weave their cloth instead of pounding [...]
Nazca lines - a giant monkey drawn on the desert floor Nazca replace the Chavin After the Chavin state collapsed about 250 BC, two new states formed in Peru - the Moche in the [...]
The Roman economy: a Roman olive press mosaic (200-250 AD) now in St. Germain en Laye, France Farming in the Roman economy Most people in the Roman world were farmers. Some [...]
India cotton (1600s AD) In the early 1600s AD, traders began to bring cotton cloth to Europe on sailing ships from India. People thought this cotton cloth was very convenient - it was pretty, [...]
Maerten van Heemskerck, Portrait of Anna Codde, 1529 In the 1500s AD, women in Europe were still getting used to using the spinning wheel instead of the drop spindle to make thread. The spinning wheel [...]
History of sheep: Scythian man milking a sheep (Ukraine, 400 BC) Why are sheep important? Sheep are an important part of the economy of North Africa, Europe, and West Asia [...]
A sheep in a pasture The most interesting thing about wool is that sheep didn't always have wool, or not enough to notice. When people first started hunting sheep, they [...]
Spinning wheel in China, Song Dynasty (the date is unknown) Why invent a spinning wheel? For more than three thousand years everybody used a hand spindle to spin wool, cotton, [...]
Modern knitting history: Stocking frame knitting machine (1750) Knitting silk stockings In the 1500s AD, knitters in Spain and France started to produce very fine knitted silk stockings, with little tiny [...]
History of knitting: Nalbinding hat from Urumchi (ca. 1000 BC) Nalbinding and sprang Even before the invention of spinning and weaving, people were making cloth using early forms of knitting [...]
