Twenty Thousand Years Ago

Here in Oaxaca I’ve been reading Women’s Work , by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. In it she talks about the evidence that suggests that women first started weaving some 20,000 years ago during the upper palaeolithic age in the Dordogne river valley in France. The author notes that until the industrial revolution changed the task of cloth making, we no longer engage in the day-to-day activity of making textiles.
That is, unless you’re in the Oaxaca valley were whole families, no, entire villages, are involved in the making cloth. This, I learned on a recent visit to Santa Ana de Valle where I visited a weaver and dyer, a reed and heddle maker, a carpenter crafting looms, and a family cultivating the cochineal bug used to make a beautiful red dye.
I don’t know how these crafters and growers view their lives, but I felt a sense of connectedness to textile makers and traditions that emerged some 20,000 years ago when humankind began to create fabric from fiber.
In the Oaxaca valley, the tradition of creating cloth by hand lives on in the lives of the people who make them and indeed the textiles themselves.