104. Textile Patterns and Processes
An analogous situation is provided by the similarity of diamond shaped patterns woven in twilled baskets in parts of North and South America, Asia and the East Indies, and Africa. This looks like parallelism and is parallelism. But it is clearly a secondary result of the twilling process, as this, in turn, flourishes most vigorously where woody monocotyledonous plants—cane, bamboo, palms—are available to furnish hard, durable, flat, pliable splints. The technique of the weave is such that if materials of two colors are used, the characteristic patterns evolve themselves almost of necessity. The twilling process may have been invented independently in several of the regions addicted to it, or have been devised only once in the world’s history. It is too simple and too ancient a technique for modern knowledge to choose between the alternatives with positiveness. Brazilian and East Indian patterns are much more likely to have been each developed on the spot, as derivatives from the more fundamental and possibly transmitted twilling process.
The coiling technique for making baskets looks from its distribution in Africa and about the Mediterranean, in northeast Asia and northwest America, in the southern extremity of South America, in Malaysia and Australia, as if it had originated independently several times, and there is partial confirmation in the fact that different varieties of coiling are typical of most of the areas. If however further knowledge should connect the now separate areas of coiling, the art would then have to be regarded as probably due to diffusion from a single invention. In that case, however, special varieties, such as half-hitch coiling in Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania, and single-rod coiling in the East Indies and California, would remain as instances of secondary parallelism affecting particular aspects or parts of the generic process.
A blending of diffusion and parallelism is apparent also in other textile processes. The fundamentals, as embodied in simple woven basketry, mats, and wiers, were probably carried into America by the first immigrants. Weaving from suspended warps and in an incomplete loom frame may possibly have been similarly transmitted by diffusion or have been developed locally. Thread spinning, however, the complete loom, and the heddle were clearly devised in the middle region of America independently of their invention in the Old World, as is evident from their absence in the connecting areas of North America and Siberia (§ [187], [188]). But the treadle shed, the next step in the Eastern hemisphere, was never invented in the Western, so that at this point the parallelism ends.
Again, diffusion and convergence both enter into the history of what is known as resist dyeing, that is, the covering of portions of textile patterns before immersion into the dye. Batik, when wax is used as the protecting medium, is one form of resist dyeing. Another method is “to tie little bunches of cloth with a cord either soaked in clay or wax or spun from fiber which has no affinity for the colors and then dip the tied web into the pot.” In the Old World, tie dyeing is of Asiatic, probably of Indian origin, and was in use by the seventh century, perhaps earlier. The Mohammedan conquests carried the art to Malaysia on the one hand, to western Africa and Spain on the other, whence it was transmitted to the Indians of Guatemala after their subjugation by the Spaniards—like the double-headed eagle. The Peruvians, however, had long before hit upon the same art, as attested by textile remains in pre-Columbian graves. Here then, we have a wide and long enduring diffusion of the general resist dyeing process, and a locally limited instance of independent parallelism for one phase of it.