History of Cotton
(this is page two; click here for page one)
A cotton and alpaca wool cloth
from Peru, about 200 AD
(in the Brooklyn Museum)
Different kinds of cotton also grew in South America, where people spun the cotton into thread and wove it into cloth maybe as early as 3000 or 4000 BC, one or two thousand years earlier than in India. By 1000 BC cotton cloth, and mixed cotton/alpaca cloth was common all along the Pacific coast of South America, in Central America and Mexico, among the Pueblo people in North America, and in the nearby West Indies islands as well. When the Apache and the Navajo people moved into the Southwest about 1400 AD, they began to wear cotton clothes too. In South America and North America, unlike in India at the same time, people did not use a machine to get the seeds out, but just pulled out the seeds with their hands.
People grew two different kinds of cotton in North and South America.
First page about cotton
Cotton after 1500 AD
Why did people want to punch Socrates?
Where did Egyptians bury your liver?
How old are the Rocky Mountains?
What does a half-timbered house look like?
How do you spin wool?
(a project)
To find out more about cotton, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Cotton and Silk, by Jacqueline Dineen (1988). For kids.
Cotton, by Guinevere Healy-Johnson and Nancy Shaw (1999). Also for kids.
Cotton
Now & Then, by Karen B. Willing (1996).
Silk
Wool
Linen
Main clothing page
