For Immediate Release Contact: Pat Kremer/Nancy O’Shea (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) Clothing as History, Culture, and Expression Anthropologists have always been interested in the history of textiles and clothing. In the production and wearing of clothes they can read the patterns of a culture’s social organization, its economy, and its interactions with other cultures. “A lot of human history has to do with cloth,” says Wali. She points to the cotton plantations and textile factories that fueled the Industrial Revolution, and to the Silk Road, along which textiles and precious metals—as well as ideas—traveled between China and the West. But the association of clothes and culture, she says, goes back much further. “What distinguishes homo sapiens from other animals is symbolic thinking,” Wali explains. “For tens of thousands of years, since at least the upper paleolithic period, humans have integrated aesthetics—symbols—into everything we do: cave art, pottery, body tattoos.” Between ten and five thousand years ago, during the neolithic revolution, our species developed agriculture and settled down; soon, labor specialization gave them the time and skills to weave finer and more elaborate designs in their clothes. “Clothes aren’t simply functional,” Wali notes. Not surprisingly, as soon as humans had the ability to make different kinds of clothes, they began using them as indicators of status. “The rarer the fabric, the harder it is to produce, and the more time and effort that goes into making an article of clothing, the more status it has,” Wali says. “So you find, for example, the Chinese emperors wearing elaborately embroidered silk robes, and the Indian maharajas in clothes woven with gold and silver thread.” The Field Museum has many such examples in its collections, from the beautiful wedding jacket of a Korean princess to the finely woven silk burial shroud of a king on the island of Madagascar. But just as revealing are the more ordinary articles of clothing, textiles, and accessories—an embroidered cotton huipil (woman’s blouse) from Guatemala, the beaded leggings of a Plains Indian, or folk textiles from China—in which anthropologists see the importance of symbols and beauty in everyday life. Continue