Making thread in Bronze Age Britain

Bronze Age Britons spliced plant fibres together to make cloth rather than spinning, a new study has found. The study, published this week in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences identified that the earliest plant fibre technology for making thread in Early Bronze Age Britain and across Europe and the Near East was splicing not spinning. In splicing, strips of plant fibres - flax, nettle, lime tree and other species - are joined in individually, often after being stripped from the plant stalk directly and without or with only minimal retting - the process of introducing moisture to soften the fibres. Splicing has previously been identified in pre-Dynastic Egyptian and Neolithic Swiss textiles, but the new study shows that this particular type of thread making technology may have been ubiquitous across the Old World during prehistory. The invention of spinning appears to coincide with urbanisation and population growth, as well as increased human mobility across the Mediterranean during the first half of the 1 ^st millennium BC, requiring larger and faster ships that relied on sail cloth. Among the finds analysed for this study are charred textile fragments from Over Barrow in Cambridgeshire, dated to the Early Bronze Age (c. BC).