the.com/basketry
weaving so ancient it predates pottery, farming, and probably your last good idea
means The craft of weaving baskets and similar containers from pliable materials like reeds, willow, grass, or splints.
from From "basket" plus the suffix "-ry," which marks a craft or its collective products (as in "jewelry" or "pottery"). "Basket" itself surfaced in Middle English, and its deeper roots are genuinely murky — there's an old guess linking it to Latin "bascauda" (a kind of washing tub or vessel), which a Roman writer claimed was a British word, but the connection is unproven. So the name for one of humanity's oldest crafts has an origin nearly as tangled as the weave itself.
- older than pots
- Baskets predate ceramics by thousands of years
- oldest finds
- Fragments date back over 10,000 years
- too fragile
- Most ancient baskets rotted, leaving few survivors
- coiled clue
- Early pottery copied basket weave patterns
- global craft
- Independently invented on nearly every continent
hopi coiled baskets — arizona hopi nation, woven ceremonial baskets with centuries of continuous tradition
rwandan intore baskets — rwanda, tightly woven cylindrical baskets from lake kivu region, unesco recognized craft
pomo baskets — northern california indigenous people, intricate baskets with feather and shell inlays, still made by descendants