The earliest Near Eastern wooden spinning implements

Abstract

A unique set of circumstances has preserved a group of rare wooden artefacts deep within burial caves in the southern Levant. Identified as spindles and distaffs, they are fashioned from tamarisk wood and date to the Late Chalcolithic period. Analysis suggests that these implements were used to spin flax fibres, and they provide the earliest evidence for two distinct spinning techniques, drop spinning and supported spinning (with rolling on the thigh). One wooden spindle with the whorl still in place is the oldest such tool to survive intact in the Near East. The lead forming the whorl may have originated in Anatolia, and it is evidence, perhaps, of early long-distance trade.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 45 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.