Warp-Weighted Looms

• Just as today, prehistoric fabric was made by running weft threads through stationary warp threads. This was first accomplished by hanging the warp threads vertically from a tree limb parallel to the ground. The warp threads were weighted near the ground to stay parallel and untangled. At first the weft was threaded through the warp by hand, but soon simple shuttles were fashioned out of tapered sticks.
  
  

Horizontal Looms

• Textile manufacture evolved by replacing hanging warp threads with ones wrapped horizontally around fixed pegs. The earliest horizontal looms were made by wrapping the warp around pegs driven into the ground, and later variations of this had the warp pass over a pit where the weaver could run the weft from underneath. With the advent of more sophisticated carpentry, early cultures developed mobile frame looms using this principle.
  
  

Spinning Whorls

• While looms are used to combine threads into fabric, the thread itself had to be created from natural fibers such as flax, cotton or wool. While this was first done by spinning the fibers by hand, the spindle was invented to make the process faster and easier. Spinning whorls, which are weights applied to a spindle to carry more momentum and thus spin faster, were invented by carving rocks. Archaeologists have found spinning whorls dating to 5000 BCE.