EXARC Journal (Nov 2020)
Testing Mesoamerican Lunate Artifacts as Possible Crescent Loom Weights
Abstract
While the importance of textiles in Mesoamerica from the Classic period (AD 250-900) onward is well-recognized, scholars have conducted little exploration of earlier Mesoamerican textile production. This lack of scholarship may be attributed in great part to the scant preservation of perishable textiles and tools from ancient times. New sources of information have been recognized, however, in the re-examination of extant Pre-Columbian textiles that illustrate unusual manufacturing techniques and in the rich depictions of textiles that are preserved in early sculpture. Further sources are found in the re-identification of a number of ancient jade objects as high-status versions of tools used for making textiles. Many of these textile tools are readily identifiable because closely comparable, preserved counterparts are found in later Mesoamerican cultures. Other early artifacts are much more difficult to identify, however, because they were involved in textile technologies used only during the Pre-Classic/Formative period (1500 BC-AD 250) and earlier; tools used for these extinct technologies would no longer be produced nor have comparable counterparts after the widespread Mesoamerican adoption of the backstrap loom at the beginning of the Classic period. One such possible tool used in early, experimental weaving technologies is a lunate jade artifact that compares closely with a crescent weight, a specialized type of loom weight found in ancient Central and Southern Europe. Replication studies serve as a pragmatic method for testing these lunate objects as warp-weighted loom weights, both by verifying their efficacy using methodologies developed to test the function of the European crescent weights, and also by exploring new possibilities for the practical applications of these types of weights.
