Baskets

'Lowering the Eel Bucks ' - From 'Life on the Upper Thames' by H.R. Robinson, 1875

We tend to think of technology as rock and metal – from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, from pyramids and statues to Viking swords and pirate cannons. We think of the things that survive to be placed in museums, in other words, and tend to neglect the early and important inventions that ordinary people used every day but whose materials did not survive centuries of exposure. 

Baskets, for example, have been replaced by plastic and other kinds of factory-made containers in almost every area of life, appearing today mainly as twee Easter decorations. Making them has become synonymous with wasting time – “basket-weaving” in the USA is slang for an easy lesson for slow students. The craft of basketry, however, might be one of our species’ most important and diverse technologies, creating homes, boats, animal traps, armour, tools, cages, hats, chariots, weirs, beehives, chicken coops and furniture, as well as all manner of containers. 

Virtually all human cultures have made baskets, and have apparently done so since we co-existed with ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats; for tens of thousands of years humans may have slept in basket-frame huts, kept predators out with basket fences, and caught fish in basket traps gathered while paddling along a river in a basket-frame boat. They might have carried their babies in basket papooses and gone to their graves in basket coffins. 

The earliest piece of ancient basketry we have comes from 13,000 years ago, but impressions on ceramics from Central Europe indicate woven fibres -- textiles or baskets – up to 29,000 years ago. (1) We have clues that the technology might be far older than that; in theory, Neanderthals or some early hominid could have woven baskets.    

 “The technology of basketry was central to daily living in every aboriginal society,” wrote ecologist Neil Sugihara, and baskets “were the single most essential possession in every family.” (2) Early humans must have regularly cropped basketry plants as they would edible plants, and burned woodlands to encourage their growth, according to anthropologist M. K. Anderson. Anderson even proposes that some of the first agriculture might have been to grow basketry crops, not food crops. (3)

….

Wicker eel trap. Courtesy of www.antiquefarmtools.info

Baskets come in several main types. Coiled baskets appeared early, created by winding flexible plant fibres from a centre outward in a spiral and then sewing the structure together. Their spiral nature, however, limits them to circular objects like bowls or hats. Beehive containers, called skeps, were built this way for hundreds of years, and straw hats still are today. 

The earliest American baskets were twined; fibre was wound around a row of rigid elements like sticks – wrapped around a stick, twisted, wrapped around the next one and twisted again. The sticks would seem to limit this approach to flat surfaces like mats, but bending and shaping the sticks allows twining to create a variety of containers and shapes. 

Still others were plaited, with flexible materials criss-crossed like threads through cloth. The Irish flattened and plaited bulrushes for hundreds of years into mats and curtains. Here too, the approach would seem to limit plaiting to flat surfaces, but as the rushes must be woven while green and flexible and harden as they dry, they can be plaited around a mould to create boxes, bags or many other shapes.  

Wicker, however, probably remains the most versatile technique, weaving flexible but sturdy material like tree shoots around upright sticks that provide support. Wicker is the form used for fences, walls, furniture, animal traps and many other advanced shapes, and when you picture a basket, you’re probably picturing wicker too. (4) 

….

Close-up of wicker. Courtesy of Wikipedia.org

Once early humans mastered the technique of fashioning wicker, they began using it for a variety of purposes beyond carrying and preparing food, and shelter probably came next. Wattle fences were made with a row of upright poles with flexible wood cuttings woven between them, a basket wall. Unusually, they could be made in modular, lightweight pieces a metre or two high and a metre or two across – hurdles -- and then uprooted, carried to a new location, and stamped into the ground where needed.

The uprights, sometimes called zales or sails in Britain, were typically rounded at the end and placed in a wooden frame, sometimes called a gallows, to hold them in place. Then withies – slim cuttings of willow or hazel – were wound back and forth around the uprights. At the end of the hurdle the withy would be twisted for greater flexibility, wound around the last zale, and woven back in the other direction. Usually a gap would be left in the middle of the hurdle, called a twilly hole, which allowed a shepherd or farmer to carry a few hurdles as a time on his back.

According to author Una McGovern, hurdle fences were vital to medieval agriculture; by keeping sheep confined without the need for permanent infrastructure, they allowed tenant farmers to graze sheep on a patch of land, letting them manure the fields one by one and deposit the fertilisers necessary for cereal crops. (5)

Wattle and daub house. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

The same technique could form the walls of a house, once a log or timber frame was built and the wattle filled in with a “daub” plaster for insulation and privacy. The daub often contained clay, human or animal hair and cow dung, and hardened around the wattle like concrete around rebar. The resulting structure could last for centuries, and even now restoring or demolishing old buildings sometimes reveals wattle inside the walls.

Similar techniques were used by cultures around the world, from Vikings to Chinese to Mayans. While their cheap and easily available materials made them an obviously popular and practical building method, not all builders loved it as a building material. The Roman architect Vetruvius, in the first century AD, moaned about the hazards of such cheap material in his Ten Books on Architecture:

“As for ‘wattle and daub’ I could wish that it had never been invented,” Veruvius wrote. “The more it saves in time and gains in space, the greater and the more general is the disaster that it may cause; for it is made to catch fire, like torches. It seems better, therefore, to spend on walls of burnt brick, and be at expense, than to save with ‘wattle and daub,’ and be in danger. And, in the stucco covering, too, it makes cracks from the inside by the arrangement of its studs and girts. For these swell with moisture as they are daubed, and then contract as they dry, and, by their shrinking, cause the solid stucco to split.

But since some are obliged to use it either to save time or money, or for partitions on an unsupported span, the proper method of construction is as follows. Give it a high foundation so that it may nowhere come in contact with the broken stone-work composing the floor; for if it is sunk in this, it rots in course of time, then settles and sags forward, and so breaks through the surface of the stucco covering.” (6)

….

Improbable as it sounds, basketry has long been used to make boats. How long we don’t know, but humans appeared in Australia 40,000 years ago, even though it was separated from Asia even in the Ice Age. They might have built wicker boats covered in animal skins, but even if they merely tied logs together into rafts, they must have had the related technology of making fibre and tying it into knots.

Basket by Native American artist Lucy Teller. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Irish used woven boats, or coracles, for hundreds – and probably thousands -- of years; they are mentioned in medieval Irish literature and are still made by aficionados today. All were woven from willow or hazel and covered with a hide – usually cow hide, but horse-hide and sealskin were also used – and supposedly waterproofed with butter. All of them were alarmingly tiny crafts in which a person sat cross-legged and sat carefully upright to avoid tipping over, like a bowl-shaped kayak. The coracle’s small size and lightweight construction ensured that, after the occupant had paddled across rivers, lakes or marshes, he could pick up his boat and walk across country with ease.

To take to the sea, the Irish wove curraghs -- larger and oval-shaped to navigate across choppy waters, but still no larger than a rowboat. Documentary footage from 1937 showed men constructing a Boyne curragh; first planting hazel rods in the ground in the desired shape, and weaving a tight frame between them along the ground – what would become the gunwale, or rim, when the frame was flipped over. Then the hazel rods were twisted together to make a wicker dome, and the frame was uprooted and turned upright and a hide placed around the frame and oiled. (7)

One common use of such craft was to set and gather fish and eel traps from rivers and lobster pots from the sea – also made, of course, from wicker. Such foods were an important source of protein, especially in Catholic countries where meat was sometimes forbidden. The traps operated on a simple principle; a bit of bait could lure an animal into the trap but, if it were shaped properly, they would be unable to escape.

….

Baskets can be woven with any one of hundreds of plant species, depending on whatever was available. In more tropical climates people used cane or raffia, while other peoples used straw or some other grass or reed. In temperate areas like Europe a wide variety of branches and plants were available: dogwood, privet, larch, blackthorn and chestnut branches; broom, jasmine and periwinkle twigs; elm, and linden shoots; ivy, clematis, honeysuckle and rose vines; rushes and other reeds, and straw.

Perhaps the most popular, however, was willow -- sallies or silver-sticks here in Ireland, osiers in Britain, vikker in Old Norse, the last of which became our word “wicker.” highly pliable when young or wet, lightweight and tough when dried, and growing so quickly that a new crop of branches up to two to three metres long can be harvested each year. 

They are one of the earliest trees to grow back appear after an old tree falls and leaves a gap of sunlight in the forest, or after a forest fire razes an area, they are perhaps the tree closest to a weed in behaviour. Their roots spread rapidly under the surface of the soil, making them an ideal crop to halt erosion. Their fast growth makes an excellent windbreak, the basis of most hedgerows, and makes them particularly useful in our era for sequestering carbon and combating climate change. The bark of the white willow (Salix alba) can be boiled to form acetecylic acid, or aspirin. 

Copse of Britanny Blue willow in January. Photo by author.

In addition, the common variety Salix viminalis or “basket willow,” has been shown to be a hyper-accumulator of heavy metals. Many plants help “clean” the soil by soaking up disproportionate levels of normally toxic materials, either as a quirk of their metabolism or as a way of protecting themselves against predators by making themselves poisonous. Many plants soak up only a single toxin, others only a few; Viminalis, it turned out, soaked up a broad range, including lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, zinc, fossil-fuel hydrocarbons, uranium, selenium, potassium ferro-cyanide and silver. (8) (9) (10)

Many hardwood trees can be coppiced, cut through at the base, or pollarded, cut at head-height , and regrow shoots on a five-to-twenty-year time scale. Willows, however, do not need to grow to maturity, and continue to thicken at the base and grow a fresh crop of shoots each year. Basket-weavers here harvested willow as a winter ritual – ten tonnes to the acre – from fields of large century-old stumps that had never been mature trees. (11)

Once the willow is cut it could be dried with the bark on, or the bark could be stripped off. Stripping was a tedious task but it made the willow easier to quickly prepare and use, reduced the risk of decay, and it gave the willow a valued white colour. To strip the bark a large willow branch was cut partway down its length, with metal strips attached to the inside of the cut; the weaver could hold the branch between their legs and use it as we would use a wire-stripping tool to remove insulation. When cuttings were too thick to manipulate, a special tool called a cleve was used to cut them three ways down their length.

Three baskets made by author. Photo by author.

Withies were typically dried for several months and kept indefinitely before soaking again for use. Willow can be woven straight from the tree, but as it dries it loosens and the weave shifts and rattles, which is seldom desirable. To a novice, preparing the materials presents as much of a challenge as the actual weaving, as the willow must be dried but re-soaked, kept wet without rotting, and used before becoming dry and brittle again.

Today a small but growing movement of people around the world tries to rediscover and re-cultivate traditional crafts and technologies. Many such techniques deserve to be revived; but some require substantial experimentation, skill, training, infrastructure or community participation. Not all low-tech solutions can be adopted casually by modern urbanites taking their first steps toward a more traditional life.

Basket-weaving, however, requires no money other than that needed for training and possibly materials. It uses materials easily found in almost every biome on Earth, requires few if any tools. Highly skilled weavers can create works of art, but simple and practical weaves can be done by almost anyone. Out of hundreds of traditional crafts, none has so many everyday applications.

Citations:

(1)    Archeologické rozhledy, 2007, Baskets in Western America 8600 BP: American Antiquity 60(2), 1995, pp. 309-318.

(2)    Fire in California's ecosystems, By Neil G. Sugihara, p. 421

(3)    Anderson, M.K. – The fire, pruning and coppice management of temperate ecosystems for basketry material by Californian Indian tribes. Human Ecology 27(I) 79-113. 1999.

(4)    The Complete Book of Basketry Techniques, Sue Gabriel and Sally Goyner, David and Charles 1999.

(5)    Lost Crafts, Una McGovern, Chambers 2009

(6)    Ten Books on Architecture, Vetruvius, Chapter 8, Section 20. Circa 20 BCE

(7)    Hands, RTE documentary by Sally Shaw Smith, episode 29, “Curraghs.”

(8)    Phytoremediation. By McCutcheon & Schnoor. 2003, New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons, page 19.

(9)    Enhancing Phytoextraction: The Effect of Chemical Soil Manipulation on Mobility, Plant Accumulation, and Leaching of Heavy Metals. By Ulrich Schmidt. In J. Environ. Qual. 32:1939-1954 (2003).

(10) The potential for phytoremediation of iron cyanide complex by Willows. By X.Z. Yu, P.H. Zhou and Y.M. Yang. In Ecotoxicology 2006.

(11) Bulletin of the Bussey Institution, Vol. II, Part VIII. p. 430. Published 1899.

C. D. Mell’s 1908 book Basket Willow Culture urged farmers to grow willows as a cash crop to feed the continual demand of weaving material, maintaining that “the demand for basket willow rods is very great and every year many thousands of bundles of rods … are imported from France, Germany and Holland.” Incredibly, it seemed that as highly valued as baskets were in the USA, the then-sparsely-inhabited country was still importing willow from comparatively small and crowded Old World countries.  (12)

Basket Willow Culture, C. D. Mell, Report Publishing Company 1908

The old trees

Few of us live in the wooden world we evolved to live in. Some urban and suburban people live near patches of trees, but these tend to be only decades old, the second and third generation after logging. The trees are not the monoliths our ancestors saw, hosting flowers and nests in their wrinkles and mushrooms like platters. Few forests today harbour dead trees still standing like monuments, fostering hundreds of kinds of life, nor is the forest floor covered in the fallen trees slowly enriching the soil.

Even the trees in this picture are simply plantings -- obviously, as they are in a neat row -- as young as a century and surrounded by a new housing development. It gives us a hint, however, of what a forest of such monoliths would have been like. I imagine it as a three-dimensional landscape, razed as humans swept across. Many such forests now seem to be a scoured flatness of suburbia, their soil nothing but a thin layer of zoysia over clay. The soil still harbours colonies of bacteria and mycellium, though, and the seeds of a new forest -- trapped under the lawns as though under glass, waiting for our brief interruption to end. 

Photo taken December 2009.

Article at Low-Tech magazine

For anyone who's interested, I wrote an article on basketry for Low-Tech Magazine, now on their web site here.

If you're not familiar with Low-Tech Magazine, it specialises in a deceptively deep question: What if high-tech solutions don't work? What if such solutions can't overcome fuel shortages, reduce climate emissions or feed tens of billions of mouths, or what if such solutions can't be sustained forever?

The magazine rescues dusty information on once-commonplace skills, and criticises conventional environmental wisdom regarding wind and solar power, and virtual commerce. It publishes detailed accounts of forgotten technologies, many from the 18th and 19th centuries when sciences like engineering were rapidly advancing but energy was still precious: floating windmills, optical telegraphs, sailing ships, timbrel vaulting, masonry ovens and so on. In short, it has proven one of the most thought-provoking and under-appreciated publications out there.

Back from London

Attended a conference for my day job.

Saw The Mousetrap. 

Stayed in the Hostel of the Surly Russians.

Ate an amazing coconut soup from a Malaysian restaurant in the West End.

Had coffee and blood pudding in Soho.


... and most importantly, fulfilled a lifelong dream: visited the Natural History Museum.


More soon.

Top photo: Back street in Kensington. Bottom photo:Underground station.

Published at Front Porch Republic

Front Porch Republic is one of my favourite online publications: both agrarian and intellectual, both ecological and conservative, both worldly and spiritual. It reminds me of a more Republican version of The Sun or Orion magazine, the kind of magazine Wendell Berry would write for.

Now it's pubished an article of mine, found here.

Here Comes the Rain Again

I took this photo of the River Liffey two years ago, when it was twice as wide as usual. Ireland saw unprecedented flooding that winter, and some homes had to be abandoned.

Yesterday we feared the same thing again, as a month of rain came down in a single day. It took one of my co-workers five hours to get home, and apartment buildings and a shopping mall in Dublin were knee-deep in water. Luckily, the rain seems to have abated for now.

Around the corner from my office...

... they were shooting a movie about the making of the Titanic, to be called Blood and Steel. The men on bicycles were apparently extras who rode around between takes.

While the cars and coats obviously date from a century ago, many men still wear the same caps and ride bicycles down the same cobblestone alleyways. Other parts of Dublin sport 21st-century glass buildings or 1970s slums, but these streets have changed little.

Vendors

Twice a week vendors line up on the sidewalks of Dublin near my office, their tables stocked with anything from beef to makeup to laundry detergent. Every so often they call to passers-by, something like “Fresh bread for saaaaaaale” or “Everything is two euuuuuro,” using the same C-to-A-sharp singsong that Americans use to sing “Air baaaaall” at a basketball game, or that Nelson Munz uses to taunt “Ha-Ha” on The Simpsons.

I don’t see the Dublin vendors enough to know them, but the Farmers' Market near our home is very different. I take The Girl there every Saturday morning, and while we don't know everyone's names, we know their faces and they know ours. They know what kind of sausage The Girl likes for breakfast, they give us their spare meat trimmings, knowing we can make use of them.

Last Friday I saw the play Juno and the Paycock at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre the night before, and I described it to a vendor while buying sardines. The vendor, who I had seen regularly for years, turned out to be a theatre buff, and told me about the play's history, and how its then-controversial treatment of the Church and the IRA caused riots when it was released.

We pass and smile at the same people each day, only occasionally learning their private passions, or realising how much they can teach us.

Glendalough

Review: Hand Made in Tasmania

Many people I know gravitate to antiques – tools or toys, decorations or devices -- for their beauty and durability. Why, however, must these qualities be antique? Age alone does not improve most items; on the contrary, antique buyers must accept deterioration as part of the item’s already high price.

What draws most antique lovers is not antiquity itself, I suspect, but craftsmanship, the hours of care and lifetime of skill imbued in the final product. A chair, a knife, or even a toy made before the energy needle often meant an investment of many hours of work by someone who had trained for years to master their craft. Such handiwork might last centuries – we have a desk two hundred years old, for example – and if it breaks it can be repaired or the pieces replaced.

While I was writing this, as it happens, my family was watching old film footage of a shoe shop in Naas, a short bicycle ride from us. The film, taken in the 1980s, showed the cobblers wrapping the leather to the shape of their client’s feet, adding layer upon layer, polishing, sewing and adding hundreds of tiny marks solely for decoration. I remarked on the hours and attention devoted to a single shoe, and my mother-in-law, who restored antiques here for decades, said, “Yes, but a pair lasted me thirty years – in six months your sneakers must be thrown away.”

Decades from now, our store-bought goods will not be antiques. Most of them are made of plastic or have some small plastic part, designed to break quickly and require a new purchase -- so most cannot be repaired, and those made of plastic and chemically-treated wood cannot even be safely burned.

Hand Made in Tasmania, edited by Steven French, features 39 crafters who adopted the opposite values, who eschewed normal careers in favour of a vocation. From luthiers to saddlers, felters to binders, each of them embraces, revives and sustains trades that we almost lost when everything became lightly acquired and discarded.

Each chapter, two to four pages long, offers a concise portrait of a single artist; how they came to their esoteric field, and why they have devoted their lives to it. Each explains the quirks and benefits of their passion -- whiskey distiller Patrick Maguire points out that his product, unlike beer or wine, can last virtually forever, or whip-maker Simon Martin explain that kangaroo leather is the strongest leather in the world.

Some of the crafts threaten to disappear altogether; saddler Rick Allen said that his profession was taken off the apprentice list in 1938, and that the last saddler in his city of Hobart died forty years later, the day he opened his shop. Martin said that only 12 whip-makers are left in the world, and that their average age is 68.

Other featured artists revive old techniques; glassblower James Dodson said he uses the same approach as Syrian craftsmen 2,000 years ago. Still others find new methods unique to their region; Joanna Gair makes paper using native plants and kangaroo dung. Some turn modern rubbish into art, like Debbie Reynolds’ baskets of found rope, driftwood and shells.

While the majority of the artists are native Tasmanians, many came from elsewhere; shoemaker Luna Newbie from the UK, knife-maker John Hounslow from New Zealand and beekeeper Yves Ginat from France. In some cases they began in a different field that led them, unexpectedly, to their craft; Hounslow came to knives through cooking, Ginat to beekeeping from farming.

French quotes author Mark Thomson that “… our civilisation, created by technology, is simply an unstable veneer that could snuff out as suddenly as a blown light bulb, leaving us with nothing to fall back on.” Some of these artists will be the people we will turn to in such circumstances – beekeepers, cheese-makers, boat-builders and basket-weavers.

Many of the subjects, admittedly, lean in more purely artistic directions: Rebecca Coote’s glass installations, Ben Kurczok’s hand-crafted kaleidoscopes, Susie McMahon’s sculpted dolls and Emma Colbeck’s refashioned buttons. But the world needs beauty as well, and the same hands that can shape the glass of a bauble could one day do the same, or teach others to do the same, for spectacles, sextant and Sterling engines.

Tasmania might be a particularly fertile ground for artisans, but you likely have people in your area keeping traditions and crafts alive. Wherever you live, there is likely a similar book waiting to be written, filled with allies waiting to be found.