How do you know it’s old?

This question comes to me very often.

And articulating the answer with mere words is not easy.

In the scientific method, we can all only resort to deductive logic to arrive at the age of a object. With the proper data points, we may be able to say with a good degree of confidence that something has a high probability of being ‘before this period’ or ‘after this period’ based on certain features.

For instance, certain dyes became available in certain regions only in certain years … so if that dye is present then it is likely that the production is after that date. However, if the dyes are all natural, that alone is not a sufficient condition to conclude that the item was produced before that date, since natural dyes are being produced even today.

A commonly used mechanism for dating is by comparison to other textiles that are in museum collections and have been dated by experts to be XYZ age. And so, if the first example (and there are published examples of this erroneous dating) is misunderstood inadvertently by some expert in the past, then like parallel mirrors, this error gets repeated over and over again.

The most technical method – radioactive carbon dating – has been used by some to add credence to a claim of age. But the certifications of age all come with a caveat that carbon dating is accurate within a band of + / – 300 years! And even with that, the test offers only a probabilistic statement of age.

So given the number of errors and the margins of all these errors, in my areas of collecting, I do not pay much attention to the actual date that has been ascribed to the object. I’d rather have no date than to have a dating that can be heavily flawed.

BUT, does this mean that it does not matter if the object is old or new? Of course not. It DOES matter to me. But it is not crucial.

I’d rather focus on the first principles – the stepping stones in the deductive logic – i.e. the features that are present in the piece. The evidence lies in the methods of production, the materials of production and the aesthetics of production.

The methods may still be alive, for example handloom weaving is still alive and well.

The materials may still be around – as we know there is a revival industry producing vegetable and mineral dyes.

And the aesthetics have been passed down in traditional societies so in some specific categories we may see something recently produced that is identical in all its qualities to older pieces.

But in most categories, this is not the case, and one or the other of the three important factors has been replaced. And it is through the absence of an old feature or the presence of a new one, that we are led to conclusions about the history or even perhaps the geography of origin.

The important thing is to look at and to handle dozens and dozens of a category to arrive at any sort of model – that these features are must-haves, those features are optional and some third group of features are anomalies. To draw these conclusions, it is important to see a large group of that category. And in the days of google and online museum collections, this is the best time in history, for researchers to conduct such studies.

But online, we aren’t always able to examine the aspects that we find interesting.

So here I’m presenting one aspect that I believe is important and is a definitive marker of age: the weaving itself.

In the olden days, in the absence of machinery, all processes were handmade. Individual hands produced unique work at every stage of the process.

• Yarn spinning would result in a range of outcomes of thickness and of evenness across the length of the thread.
• The weaving was not uniform or even and depended on the loom setup as well as the practices followed

With the advent of even simple machinery, this ‘unevenness’ began to disappear from each of the processes.

And it is this unevenness that I believe is a good marker for age.

In the wovensouls collection, the largest group of really old textiles are the Indian trade textile fragments and the Sumatran shipcloths.

To explain this unevenness visually here are some closeups of textiles from these two collections.

SUMATRAN SHIP CLOTHS

INDIAN TRADE TEXTILE FRAGMENTS FOUND IN TORAJA

These photos have been taken with a regular phone camera – so you can easily compare these to any cloth that is machine-made and see the difference.

Click on each, magnify each to see the uneven character.

If I find this quality in a textiles that is offered to me, my heart beats a little faster…every single time 🙂

How old is it? I still can’t say …. because by looking at it I have no way to know whether it was made in 1920 or 1900 or 1880….

But I can say it is old enough for me and it has the features I look for.

What are your thoughts on this?

Do comment

And thank you for staying with my midnight rambling on this subject until the end 🙂

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See the Indian Trade Textile Collection here

See the Sumatran Ship cloth collection here

jaina mishra