THE WORLD'S COTTONS — HUTCHINSON 509 



cottons arose, members of a New World species but bred in, and 

 adapted to, tlie Nile Valley. Furthermore, the replacement of basin 

 irrigation by high-level flow irrigation having been undertaken under 

 the stimulus of the need for water at all seasons for a perennial cotton 

 crop, the perennial plant was replaced by an annual, and the new 

 irrigation system was used to grow two short-term crops each year 

 instead of one perennial. 



THE ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED COTTONS 



All four species of the cultivated cottons were established crop 

 plants long before the beginning of historical records. Evidence of 

 their status before the dawn of history is available only from a few 

 specially favorable places. A fortunate accident led to the preser- 

 vation of a small fragment of cotton fabric and a small piece of 

 cotton string in the neck of a silver vessel recovered during excava- 

 tions at Mohenjo-Daro in West Pakistan. The fragments, which are 

 believed to date from about 3000 b.c, were made from raw material 

 indistinguishable from the product of the indigenous coarse henga- 

 lense cottons found in the area at the present day. Both fabric and 

 string were well made, and indicated the existence at that time of a 

 well-established, mature textile craft, of which cotton must have been 

 a familiar raw material. 



In the New World, the earliest known textiles were discovered first 

 by Dr. Junius Bird at a site on the north Peruvian coast known as the 

 Huaca Prieta [2, 3]. The Huaca Prieta is a mound made up of the 

 occupation refuse of a people who did not use pottery and did not 

 grow maize. They did grow cotton, beans, and some cucurbits. Their 

 cotton was very short-fibered and veiy coarse, and among present-day 

 cottons is most closely matched by some of the very coarse primitive 

 harhadense cottons of the same area. The textile craft of the Huaca 

 Prieta appeared at first sight to be very primitive, but a recent recon- 

 struction of a Huaca Prieta fabric (J. B. Bird, personal commu- 

 nication) has shown an unexpectedly elaborate pattern worked into 

 the material. Evidently, even at that date (ca. 2400 b.c), the people 

 of the Huaca Prieta were familar with cotton, and were far beyond 

 the stage of experimenting with a new raw material. 



The use of cotton as a textile goes back far into prehistory in both 

 hemispheres. The archeological record is inevitably incomplete, since 

 cotton fabrics and cotton plant material have survived only in the 

 driest of the areas in which the crop is cultivated. For further evi- 

 dence on the origin of the cottons it is necessary to study the botany 

 and cytology of the cultivated species and their wild relatives. 



The wild members of the genus Gossypium are rare shrubs of the 

 semiarid and arid regions of the Tropics. Watt [27] recorded species 

 from Australia, India, North and Central America, and the Galapagos 



