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LOOM AND SPINDLE—HOOPER. 631 
Discoverers of such relics as these are often apt to exaggerate in 
their imagination the attainments of the people who produced them. 
Thus, Prof. Messekommer, who in 1882 was fortunate enough to find 
the most important and probably earliest of the lake dwellers’ vil- 
lages at Robenhausen, as already described, says that “he is con- 
vinced, from the specimens of textiles there found, that all manner of 
weaving was thoroughly known at the very beginning of the lake- 
building period.” An expert examination of these fragments, how- 
ever, does not bear out his assumption. They are, as we have seen, 
all webs of the very simplest kind, and are just such as are woven 
by savage people of to-day, 
by means of the most ele- 
mentary weaving appli- 
ances. No traces of tools 
for textile work were found 
beyond whorls for spindles, 
one or two charred spindles 
with thread wound on them, 
sharp-toothed combs, which 
were probably used for pre- 
paring the raw fiber, and a 
few weights of earthenware, 
similar to those which were 
used by the Greeks and 
Romans for weighting the 
warp threads of their up- 
right looms. 
In reconstructing the life 
and operations of ancient 
and prehistoric man from 
the scanty relics which are 
available, it is most reason- 
able to imagine that weav- 
ing, and in fact work of all : 
kinds, was carried on with Fis. 1.—Fragments of linen cloth, woven by the 
fhe. maximum -of human prehistoric lake dwellers of Switzerland. 
craft and patience and the minimum of mechanical contrivances. 
We should not imagine how quickly and easily things might have 
been made, but how simply, even though with infinite pains, the work 
could have been done. ; 
Bearing this in mind let us examine two interesting relics of the 
handiwork of a prehistoric weaver shown in figure 1. 
These are not, like so many of the fragments, netted or knitted 
from a single thread. This is proved by the regular and flat inter- 
lacement of its strands, which cross each other at right angles. How- 
