Mm. Have been wondering about this, too. It's sometimes obvious when a piece of "needlebound"(new word, too) fabric is misidentified as "an early knitting technique". But some of the basket weaves, some of the shawl finds, and so on, also seem eagerly misidentified as having to have been employing what we now call "needlebinding". Another problem seems to be, like you mention, that something is identified and placed to a specific time because it looks like needlebinding, and then another time (the usual split happens between 900-1000 or so as the invention of knitting, basically - which is as dubious as suggesting that long, continuous threads weren't invented until that point in time, etc.). The Tybrind Vig finds in Denmark, for example, may very well have been done with needles and looping techniques. And they clearly had the techniques to make fabric. But did they? Rather than using a loom, or using looping techniques with pickups? Like in every other field, really, the generalisations about what sort of techniques were used, or at which specific point in time something was invented is often much more problematic than we think. As an example, there is a find of writing in the city-museum downtown that someone happened on - it's from the 1200s, long after latin letters would be commonly used. But it's got greek-inspired handwriting, next to latin letters... and then there's runes on the side, just to make sure. It's not put there as a historical document, it's just a trivial receipt of an inventory in one case, and a sample of someone learning to write in another. So in the 1200s, these guys were rediscovering their norse roots, and using runes because they were cool. While the old guys were writing latin with greek-style handwriting. While the common usage of writing was latin letters. So our finds from the 1200, that actually can be dated in this case because of a city-fire leveling the whole thing and preserving tattered bits and pieces from the same period -- they were already reinventing latin and greek, as well as runic norse, long after the "period" that any of these things belong in, according to "the historical record". And where there isn't an obvious link connecting the greeks to norse settlements. In the same way, our contextual clues now are helping us rediscover needle-binding techniques - but not recreating what was probably also reinventions to some extent. So "the ancients" are, by virtue of just being people like us, romanticising the past and the present according to need, "tricking" us to classify finds to wrong periods. It's very fascinating, and it's an effect everyone should be aware of in any discipline, whether it's trying to interpret old texts by way of assumed contextual cultural information, or if it's identifying fabric-samples. It's really exactly the same issue.
Nalbinding is to textiles as quantum physics is to science! Brava to you, Anne, for your serious research on this textile technique.
Mm. Have been wondering about this, too. It's sometimes obvious when a piece of "needlebound"(new word, too) fabric is misidentified as "an early knitting technique". But some of the basket weaves, some of the shawl finds, and so on, also seem eagerly misidentified as having to have been employing what we now call "needlebinding". Another problem seems to be, like you mention, that something is identified and placed to a specific time because it looks like needlebinding, and then another time (the usual split happens between 900-1000 or so as the invention of knitting, basically - which is as dubious as suggesting that long, continuous threads weren't invented until that point in time, etc.). The Tybrind Vig finds in Denmark, for example, may very well have been done with needles and looping techniques. And they clearly had the techniques to make fabric. But did they? Rather than using a loom, or using looping techniques with pickups?
Like in every other field, really, the generalisations about what sort of techniques were used, or at which specific point in time something was invented is often much more problematic than we think. As an example, there is a find of writing in the city-museum downtown that someone happened on - it's from the 1200s, long after latin letters would be commonly used. But it's got greek-inspired handwriting, next to latin letters... and then there's runes on the side, just to make sure. It's not put there as a historical document, it's just a trivial receipt of an inventory in one case, and a sample of someone learning to write in another. So in the 1200s, these guys were rediscovering their norse roots, and using runes because they were cool. While the old guys were writing latin with greek-style handwriting. While the common usage of writing was latin letters.
So our finds from the 1200, that actually can be dated in this case because of a city-fire leveling the whole thing and preserving tattered bits and pieces from the same period -- they were already reinventing latin and greek, as well as runic norse, long after the "period" that any of these things belong in, according to "the historical record". And where there isn't an obvious link connecting the greeks to norse settlements. In the same way, our contextual clues now are helping us rediscover needle-binding techniques - but not recreating what was probably also reinventions to some extent. So "the ancients" are, by virtue of just being people like us, romanticising the past and the present according to need, "tricking" us to classify finds to wrong periods. It's very fascinating, and it's an effect everyone should be aware of in any discipline, whether it's trying to interpret old texts by way of assumed contextual cultural information, or if it's identifying fabric-samples. It's really exactly the same issue.