Page 52 - J. C. Turner "History and Science of Knots"

40 History and Science of Knots

Indirectly, however, other find categories, such as the textile remains
found at Tybrin Vig, can give us some impression of what we might expect
to find. Those textile fragments had been constructed using the `needle bind-
ing' technique [10], a difficult technique requiring skill and spatial insight,
and clearly the result of a long tradition. The skill and the materials to con-
struct many different and complicated knots were thus available by the late
Mesolithic period at the least. This is not to say, of course, that such knots
were therefore indeed produced. Technology and skill are by no means the
only factors at work here. But it will not be too surprising if they do turn up
some day.
As an extra, I will end by mentioning another find from outside Denmark,
and early-Mesolithic fish-net fragment from Antrea (Vuoksenniska), on the
Karelian isthmus, formerly east-Finland, which was recently brought to my
attention. The fragment was found in 1913 by workers digging in, again, a
bog which had formerly been part of a sea strait between the Baltic Sea and
Lake Ladoga. The whole find consisted of the net itself, with its floats and
weights, a number of bone, stone and antler artefacts, and other objects of
stone and wood. It was interpreted as the remains of a fishing boat, with net
and toolkit, which sank.* The net itself was originally quite long, about 27 to
30 metres, and between 1.3 and 1.5 metres high. It was made of willow, with its
31 stone-weights attached by willow bark. The meshes were about 6 cm apart,
and knotted by what Palsi [13, p. 16] calls a `Russian knot', a type known
from Estonia and the eastern regions of Finnish settlement (Fig. 5). There is
one radiocarbon dating from one of the netfloats, which recorded 9280±210
B.P., a date which fits well with the geological date of the surrounding bog.

Fig. 5. The Antrea ` Russian Knot'
Antrea. Source: Palsi 1920, 1-19

CONCLUSIONS

We can be certain that both the materials and the skill necessary to make
complicated knots were present in Europe from a very early age, at least since

*Taavitsainen, unpublished mss.; thanks to Pieter van de Griend for providing a copy.