Plants to textiles: Local bast fiber textiles at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Çatalhöyük

Textiles from Neolithic Çatalhöyük are among the earliest and best-preserved woven plant artifacts from ancient Southwest Asia. Recent examinations of textiles from Çatalhöyük’s East Mound middle habitation phase (6700–6500 cal. B. C.) provide surprising evidence that instead of being made from flax (linen, Linum usitatissimum), as previously thought, the fibers are from the inner bark of trees (tree bast), some samples identified as bast from locally growing oak (Quercus sp.). The present paper reports on a separate analysis of five woven textile and two cordage fragments, also from the middle habitation phase. Our aims were to identify their raw material origins, distinguish the thread-making technology present, and to situate them within the broader chaîne opératoire of thread and textile making in the prehistory of the region. We observed that the thread-making technology was based on an end-to-end splicing method, and while agreeing with the earlier published study, that tree bast, not flax, was the source of the fiber, our results further suggest that elm (Ulmus sp.) and willow/poplar (Salicaceae) were also among the bast raw materials used in textile manufacture at the site. From these results we can infer that the textile makers possessed complex understandings of the biology, physiology, and seasonality of local wild tree genera throughout the surrounding environment