Posted by James Allen on December 07, 1998 at 09:03:13:
In Reply to: Clarification, please posted by Steve Price on December 07, 1998 at 05:18:21:
: Dear Jim,
: Your (very provocative) posting alludes to skilled nomadic weavers more than 20,000 years ago who constructed the sphinx and several references to someone named Barber. For the unenlightened among us (and I am one of them), would you clarify -
: 1. Who is Barber, what is the evidence on which she based her arguments, and where can her writings be found?
: 2. Enormous stone structures like the sphinx seem like the most unlikely of all possible nomadic creations. What is the evidence that huge structures that must have taken years or decades to construct were made by nomads? Where did they find the time? What was their motive?
: Best regards,
: Steve Price
: That would be the world famous E.J.W. Barber and the book is Prehistoric Textiles, Princeton University Press, 1991. Now as far as the Sphinyx goes I was just fleshing in the skeleton that has arisen. That being that the Sphinyx is undoubtedly over 10,000 years old and possibly much older. There are red granite carvings in Africa and on other continents depicting naked horsemen holding aloft tridents. My simple thesis was put these facts all together, a race making long term statements concerning their "naked" dominion over the Earth and A huge unimaginably difficult to build edifice and one needs a means to those ends. Those tridents may have been receivers of some sort of energy source we are not fully aware of. They may have had a technology we haven't imagined yet. This isn't really so strange it just has been taboo for a very long time to dare admit that evolution has been degenerating in man for millenium. We arn't getting better we are getting worse, hence I like other peoples art. Remember the old phrase ontology recapitulates phylogony? I think that applies to your TULU weavings. They represent an early phase in the evolution of more sophisticated weaving techniques. They existed because they efficiently served a purpose and as long as that purpose exists they will be produced traditionally. Aesthetic is free of technique in the mind of the most advanced connoiseur. Clarity of inner vision and resonance with the message projected by a work of ethnographic art is the sine qua non of the collecting experience. JIM