Project Gutenberg's Aboriginal American Weaving, by Mary Lois Kissell

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Title: Aboriginal American Weaving

Author: Mary Lois Kissell

Release Date: February 11, 2008 [EBook #24568]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Aboriginal American Weaving

---- BY ----

MISS MARY LOIS KISSELL,

American Museum of Natural History,

NEW YORK CITY.

A Paper Read before The National Association of Cotton Manufacturers
at their Eighty-eighth Meeting at Mechanics Fair Building, Boston,
Mass., April 27th, 1910.

[Illustration]

ABORIGINAL AMERICAN WEAVING.

MISS MARY LOIS KISSELL, American Museum of Natural History, New York
City.

Wonderful as is the development of modern machinery for the
manufacture of American textiles--machinery which seems almost human
in the way it converts raw materials into finished cloth; just as
surprising are the most primitive looms of the American aborigines,
who without the aid of machinery make interesting weavings with only a
bar upon which to suspend the warp threads while the human hand
completes all the processes of manufacture. Modern man's inventive
genius in the textile art has been expended upon perfecting the
machinery, while primitive man's ingenuity has resulted in making a
beautiful weaving with very simple means.

No doubt could we know the history of primitive loom work in America
prior to the coming of the white man, we would find an extended
distribution of weaving, but all early textiles have been lost owing
to the destructability of the material and the lack of climatic and
other conditions suitable for their preservation--conditions such as
are present in the hot desert lands of the S