Welcome to the Fiber, Loom and Technique journal

We are delighted to announce the publication of our new journal, which will provide a forum for publishing papers (of any length) on aspects of textile and fiber production, historical, archaeological and ethnographic. Our first two papers are from Long Bo and Zhao Feng of the China National Silk Museum, and Eric Boudot (independent), and they provide complementary views of the early development of complex loom technologies at the eastern end of the Silk Road. Long Bo and Zhao Feng's paper reviews the ethnographic and archaeological evidence for multi-heddle patterning systems, and in particular compares contemporary examples with the loom models recently excavated from the Laoguanshan tomb in Sichuan Province in China, one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of the past decade. Eric Boudot's paper reviews an important early textile found in the west of China, now in the Chris Hall collection, and the evidence it provides for a patterning system providing repeats in the weft direction. Eric provides a detailed hypothesis for the type of loom that might have been used, based on a vertical zilu loom with cross-cord system for selecting warps. We hope you enjoy these papers. There are more coming soon!

Chris Buckley (editor)

Sandra Sardjono (President, Tracing Patterns Foundation)