What if we called it the Flax Age instead of the Iron Age?

https://lithub.com/what-if-we-called-it-the-flax-age-instead-of-the-iron-age/

by raldi • 7 years ago

75 88 7 years ago

It's always annoying to see identity politics injected into hard sciences:

Archaeologists—predominantly male—gave ancient ages names like “Iron” and “Bronze,” rather than “Pottery” or “Flax.”

Entire cultures are named after their pottery. For example, there are the "corded ware culture" and "bell beaker culture." Archaeologists pay very close attention to material culture (including more feminine items like jewelry). Maybe - just maybe - it's harder to know about fabrics than metals because the former degrade more quickly than the latter. Or we could just blame it on men.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corded_Ware_culture

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Beaker_culture

SamBam3• 7 years ago

I think it's important to acknowledge the biases of the scientists or researchers that study first-hand materials. They absolutely affect the research and conclusions they produce and affect how the broader public understand history and science.

That said, you are absolutely right in the particulars here. Pottery is extremely important to our understanding of human history -- that was an absurd mistake in the article, since it is so important -- and it makes sense that fabrics have been less important simply because there is much less evidence of the particulars of it.

On an unrelated note, I love flax and its many uses. I love that when we eat it as seed we call it "flax seed," when we use it as cooking oil we call it "flax oil," when we use it as a protective finish we call it "linseed oil," when we make it into cloth we call it "linen," and when we make it into flooring we call it "linoleum." Let me know if I missed others.

SketchySeaBeast2• 7 years ago

To be fair, studies like history and archaeology are anything but hard sciences. One of the history courses I took during my degree was dedicated entirely to looking at historical texts and trying to see the biases of the historian who wrote them. There's always reason to look for bias in primary sources and secondary sources and then try and learn from them. Re-framing what we know in different lights definitely has value.

All that being said, it does feel like a weird jab to throw in the male bit at the beginning. But that's who was studying this at one time, and realizing that and being open to re-framing doesn't hurt.

klyrs4• 7 years ago

I know a few female archaeologists. They've uniformly experienced sexism, ridicule, scorn, and harassment for being women. The hard sciences are steeped in identity politics, and have been as long as there have been hard sciences. God forbid somebody actually talk about the assumptions and biases that result.

zozbot234• 7 years ago

Archaeology is not usually considered part of the "hard" sciences - depending on whom you ask, it's either among the "soft" or the "social" sciences.

nitwit005• 7 years ago

Investigating bias can be important, but I feel this author needs to consider their own biases.

The idea that women might favor naming based on textiles or clothing appears purely based on stereotypes about women, and seems a bit offensive to me.

paganel• 7 years ago

Not sure why you're getting down-voted, because you're totally right. I'd add the fibulae to the list of "female" archaeological artifacts closely studied by, well, archeologists. For example the history of late 6th - early 7th century Slavs in South-Eastern Europe is mostly "deduced" by studying women-worn fibulae like those presented in articles like this [1]

[1] https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=639506

cardiffspaceman2• 7 years ago

So here's a question about flax, and other things.

It seems like there is a technological progression in clothing from "I take the unprocessed hides from the animals I kill or the leaves and vines around me and just wear them" to "I tan hides to make leather" to "I grow flax or cotton to make fibers and fabric"

Actual question: Do these technologies correspond to lengthy time frames in large areas in such a way that it could be useful to identify a "Leather Age/Culture" or "Plant fiber Age/Culture"?

Merrill3• 7 years ago

Sewing is a vital technology, since only with sewn, multi-layer clothing was cold-intolerant Homo sapiens able to colonize the middle and upper latitudes of the Eurasian continent during the last Ice Age. In the referenced article, it mentions needles from about 35,000 years ago. Presumably the earliest garments were furs stitched with sinew threads, but plant fiber thread from 34,000 has been found in Georgia. The archaeological problem is that bone needles and organic fibers do not endure to the present like stone and copper.

dang2• 7 years ago

Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We don't need yet another gender flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The specific information in your comment is good. If you dropped the first sentence, the last sentence, and the snark ("Maybe - just maybe"), your comment would be a much better contribution to HN.

calvinmorrison• 7 years ago

"maybe don't post shitty popsci articles about how men are evil" - me, 2019

bovermyer2• 7 years ago

As someone who is writing a tool that procedurally generates random textile and clothing styles for fantasy cultures, this article is extremely useful to me.

contingencies• 7 years ago

Cool. You could probably generate real clothing patterns, too, and have some robotic textile fabricators execute them. Have you seen the Mount & Blade: Bannerlord updates on clothing? https://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/61 https://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/84

bovermyer2• 7 years ago

Not yet, but I'll check them out now! Thanks for sharing.

janpot• 7 years ago

This implies that metal objects were the principal features of these times, when they are simply often the most visible and long-lasting remnants.

I'm not an archeologist so I probably lack a lot of context, but I assume metal requires more advanced technology to acquire. It seems kind of logical to me to name a period after its most advanced technology.

mrob• 7 years ago

I don't think metals technology was significantly more advanced than textiles technology. Turning plants into good quality fabrics is a complicated process with non-obvious steps. E.g. retting (controlled partial rotting of plants to aid removal of the bast fibers) is IMO something non-intuitive, just like smelting of metals.

But textiles technology gave only small incremental improvements with each step. Plant-based fabrics were more convenient than animal skins, but they weren't something fundamentally new. Metals however could be used to make things completely impossible with older technologies, so they're a better candidate for naming time periods.

bluGill2• 7 years ago

I don't think so. Retting isn't obvious, but it isn't hard to imagine that someone encountered some material that wasn't preserved and it rotted in the right way. This could be accidentally finding it, or storing some for latter processing and then dieing - only latter was the cache discovered and used.

jcranmer• 7 years ago

How do you define "advanced"? It's not always clear.

For example, bronze metallurgy is easier to achieve (it requires lower temperatures) than iron metallurgy. But bronze is, for many use cases, a superior technology to iron. So is iron or bronze "more advanced technology"?

It's also easy to underestimate the difficulty in mundane technologies. Take bread for instance; this is how you make bread: Grow a grass (cereal crop). Separate the seeds, dry them, and then shell them to get your grains. Now grind it into flour, and then mix it with water, fat, and salt. Let it sit out to grow a yeast infection. Stick it in a fire, and then you get bread.

Compare this to typical metalworking: Find the appropriate ore. Stick it in a fire. Depending on the metal, let it melt completely and pour it into a sand cast, or get it red-hot and then bang on it with a hammer.

The popular conception of technology often hews towards a Civilization-style technology tree model, but the consensus of historians and anthropologists in modern times is that this model is quite far from the truth, and that trying to impose that model on what we know of history unnecessarily limits our understanding.

whatshisface2• 7 years ago

So is iron or bronze "more advanced technology"?

Iron. Advancement doesn't mean "overall quality," it means difficulty and sophistication, including the sophistication and difficulty of the necessary supply chain. A computer is a more advanced technology than a shovel, even though if you need to dig a hole the computer would be useless. That's the definition of advanced.

Bronze is not easy to make, but iron is more difficult, requiring better furnaces. Given access to the right raw materials, any civilization that can make iron can make bronze but not the other way around.

Find the appropriate ore. Stick it in a fire.

Open fires aren't hot enough to melt any but the softest metals, like tin. Building fires required to reach metallurgical temperatures is a very difficult task whose know-how evolved slowly over millennia.

weberc2• 7 years ago

It's also easy to underestimate the difficulty in mundane technologies. Take bread for instance; this is how you make bread: Grow a grass (cereal crop). Separate the seeds, dry them, and then shell them to get your grains. Now grind it into flour, and then mix it with water, fat, and salt. Let it sit out to grow a yeast infection. Stick it in a fire, and then you get bread. Compare this to typical metalworking: Find the appropriate ore. Stick it in a fire. Depending on the metal, let it melt completely and pour it into a sand cast, or get it red-hot and then bang on it with a hammer.

Your example doesn't support your point. You're simply going into more detail on the baking process than the smithing process. In particular, none of these things are trivial:

* finding the right ore (generally depends on trade and specialization)

* making a fire hot enough to melt metal

* making a sand cast

* alloying the metal

* rooting out impurities such that the finished artifact is useful

* the technical processes of casting and forging

failrate• 7 years ago

No, deriving metal from ore is not as easy as you make it out to be. Even the construction of a simple bloom furnace requires a fair amount of knowledge of the properties of fire. You can make a bloom furnace with your hands out of mud, so if it was trivial to make metal objects, why was the stone hand ax the predominant tool on record for most of human history?

perl4ever• 7 years ago

"Compare this to typical metalworking: Find the appropriate ore. Stick it in a fire. Depending on the metal, let it melt completely and pour it into a sand cast, or get it red-hot and then bang on it with a hammer."

This reminds me of something I read about the "Great Leap Forward" in China, where my impression is authorities thought something like, yeah, metalworking is simple, let's get everyone making steel, and then the results were not good for much.

So, sure, bread is something that doubtless took thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of years to develop, but that's no reason to take metalworking for granted.

I keep being reminded of this post which I first saw on HN: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

Except, come on, it's not surprising.

goto112• 7 years ago

The periods are named after the characteristic material of the finds. It is not really about "most advanced", it is about what have been preserved. Lots of iron tools/weapons are preserved from the iron age, lots of bronze tools/weapons have been preserved from the bronze age.

The division is from the 1820's and based on the finds available at the time. Of course today we have much better tools (like carbon dating) but the basic division is still valid.

There is no "pottery age" because pottery is known through the ages, but specific characteristics of pottery is indeed used to subdivide the periods and cultures - Funnelbeaker culture, Linear Pottery culture etc. To suggest that pottery have been ignored by archeologists is absurdly ignorant.

chewz• 7 years ago

but I assume metal requires more advanced technology to acquir

Anyone can make a crude knife. Try making a cotton scarf.

We are taking textiles for granted (as in t-shirts and fast fashion) but until XIX century for hundreds of years nothing could match Indian cotton fabrics which were used as mean of exchange in all over Asia.

https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/indian-textiles-na...

https://medium.com/@noopurshalini/textiles-of-india-d9f5e531...

Cthulhu_• 7 years ago

Looking at Primitive Technology, I'd call all of those eras the Clay Age - he uses clay for pretty much everything, including (of course) trying to melt iron from mud.

ncmncm4• 7 years ago

Fair bit of wood, besides.

narrator• 7 years ago

There is one primitive tech guy who actually got iron smelting working enough to make a useable knife[1]. This naturally took him an enormous amount of work and patience.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXniZZly4oA

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

While textiles are a twice neglected area due to decay and some cultural biases the flax age wouldn't be remotely the right naming convention. The invention age naming convention would imply when they /first used it widespread/. So a few meteoric iron artifacts in the Bronze Age wouldn't make it Iron Age but iron becoming commonplace in tools and weapons would. Similarly if we kept up metalic conventions medieval aluminium wouldn't count but 19th century when they started enmasse refining could be an "Aluminium Age" if not for the fact we know enough from records that it would be redundant.

Calling it the Flax Age would be like calling Prebellum Southern US "the cotton age" - it was used already for thousand of years in several prior ages!

We probably can't trace it that precisely from lack of evidence but a Flax Age would probably be among the Neolithic ages and certainly not the Iron Age.

zebrafish5• 7 years ago

The ages are named for the technology that made the most significant difference in history. Not because the archeologists are male, but because you can do things with iron that you cannot do with stone or wood or bone.

I will grant that textiles are probably not given enough attention, but an army covered in flax clothes with wooden spears stands no chance against an army equipped with iron equipment.

gshdg• 7 years ago

But why is the leading military technology the only thing we care about when defining an age?

octokatt• 7 years ago

Actually, linen armor was hugely influential [1] [2].

The focus on battles and war in history instead of how civilizations change seems short-sighted, especially as it limits the amount of time a history class can help students understand other cultures. Which, given globalization and the internet, might be a better use of time.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34810209/ns/technology_and_science...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Reconstructing-Ancient-Linen-Body-Arm...

goto112• 7 years ago

It is not "the most significant difference", it is simply a questions of which materials have been preserved for archeologists to study.

I'm sure that agriculture was a much more significant change than the introduction of bronze.

optimuspaul• 7 years ago

Calling it the Flax Age would be like calling Prebellum Southern US "the cotton age"

Antebellum

lopmotr• 7 years ago

Prewar. Since everybody knows what that means instead of these weird Latin words. It's even worse because the choice of language contains information about which war it refers to! Latin for the American civil war and English for WWII. Let the context determine which war you're talking about, not some arbitrary choice of language.

jacobolus• 7 years ago

“Prebellum” and “antebellum” are both ways of saying “before the war” in Latin. There is nothing wrong with the former term, other than its relative rarity. If you search you can find “prebellum” being used (in the same sense as “antebellum”, e.g. with reference to the US South before the 1860s) in various academic papers, newspaper articles, etc.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22prebellum%22&tbm=bks

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=prebellum

Merrill3• 7 years ago

On a site called Literary Hub, they should recognize that the best reason for a "Flax Age" is the production of linen paper beginning about 1350 CE.

Previously, parchment made expensively and laboriously from animal hides was the medium for the written word in Europe. However, a cheaper medium was needed for less important documents, and "rag paper" made from old linen clothes began to be produced in greater volumes in the mid-14th Century. As volumes increased it became much cheaper than parchment. As a result, Gutenberg's invention of movable type was economically advantageous and the literary explosion in Europe resulted. Had parchment still been the only medium available, the cost of books would have been very expensive, whether produced by scribe or printing press.

saalweachter2• 7 years ago

... 1350 CE in Europe; it was in common usage in the Islamic world centuries earlier, and a millennium earlier in China.

zebrafish5• 7 years ago

The paper isn't the point, the press is. As is evidenced by your dates, linen paper in and of itself does not move the needle much. Asia Minor and China never produced a press. The idea of cheap, disposable paper that leads someone to think up a mass production scheme moves the needle a lot.

ncmncm4• 7 years ago

It mentions Dzudzuana three times, but does not explain it. Presumably that is explained elsewhere in the book, but it is used inconsistently, thus confusingly, here.

luxuryballs• 7 years ago

Welp, guess who is going to fire up Civ 5 tonight? This guy.

marcoseliziario• 7 years ago

Metals are far more important because metals provide better tools and weapons.

Better fibers give more comfort, better resistance to the elements. But, in itself, is not as much transformative as better tools and weapons.

If you went back to the distant past with modern clothes, you'd have some marginal survival advantages, but not enough for your tribe if you needed to fight for scarce resources like food.

So yes, Iron is far more relevant than flax. Because Iron gave better tools, and our history is basically the history of our tools (and weapons)

dekhn• 7 years ago

Linseed (flax) and using limestone are both technologies that are underappreciated.

cardiffspaceman2• 7 years ago

While beer/mead/ale making is noted in descriptions of cultures, it seems like it would be a fun deep dive for teaching history to teenagers.

Cyberdog• 7 years ago

Intriguingly, a 2013 discovery in southeast France has led to tentative suggestions that Homo sapiens may not have been the first species to have made string. A tiny sliver of twisted fibers—just 0.028 inches long—was found in a site occupied by Neanderthals 90,000 years ago, well before sapiens arrived in Europe.

Is "0.028 inches" a typo here? How would anyone find a thread that short, and, if found, how could one tell that the thread was intentionally woven instead of just fibers lying next to each other and getting twisted together by random chance?

Swenrekcah• 7 years ago

Seriously, that’s only 0.7 mm. It could be the diameter?

morelisp• 7 years ago

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773... is apparently the relevant paper.

The fiber was some remnants found on stone tools, apparently. I don't have the archaeological background to say if the claim it's not possible to twist in nature in plausible or not.

amelius• 7 years ago

I'm wondering: did they eat a lot of flaxseed in that period? I'm asking because I like flaxseed, and there seems to be a limit on how much the body (my body) can handle of it.

Spooky23• 7 years ago

Textiles are incredibly important, but the age is defined by conflict.

End of the day, you can make the finest cloth, but if you're armed with bronze weapons, whomever comes in with iron weapons and armor are going to kill you.

jbay808• 7 years ago

Unless they freeze to death along the way.

b0rsuk• 7 years ago

Another activity not given enough attention is fishing. Remnants of fish, as well as fishing tools are perishable, but they played an important role before the neolithic revolution. The name seems to be misleading.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190115200036.h...

What if we called it the Flax Age instead of the Iron Age?

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