Sew sew wrong

The Music Maker

Columnist Peter Edgerton looks at new research into Bronze Age sewing skills - and confirms that boys were just as hopeless four thousand years ago

Peter Edgerton

At the snappily-named Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, they have been studying some human teeth originally discovered in El Argar, Almeria which are more than 4,000 years old. Various conclusions have been reached, one of which is, presumably, the importance of regular brushing.

Another deduction appears to have provoked some surprise among experts - that the dental evidence points to a clear demarcation between the social organisation of the roles of men and women. Apparently, marks on their teeth show that girls and women employed them as a kind of third hand when using threads to make ropes and baskets and the like. Nobody has said officially whether the men's teeth were found to be riddled with spinach and tobacco.

Clearly those who have been a little taken aback by all of this never went to a primary school like mine. Occasionally, we'd get round to doing a few sums or to spelling things like 'Mississippi' but mostly it was just making stuff, arts and crafts they called it, though any art on display was minimal at best and the only crafty bit was taking as many short cuts as possible in order to finish early to make good our escape and play twenty-a-side football outside with a tennis ball.

Among the various delights foisted upon our unsuspecting souls were tie-dye T-shirts (it was the seventies but, come on, we were eight years old), papier-maché blobs that should, in theory, have become something more edifying but never got beyond the blob stage, medieval shoes (don't ask), clay ash trays (it was the seventies but, come on, we were eight years old) and lots of sewing stuff.

Where the last one was concerned, the girls in our class would consistently produce intricately woven colourful designs that any parent would have been proud to have gracing their mantelpiece. Meanwhile the boys' efforts might at best be described as absolute rubbish.

On one particularly memorable occasion, Stephen Ashton swore blind he had sewn his mother's and father's names into the square of cloth we'd all been given, while the formidable Mrs Sweetnam was convinced it was a cunningly disguised swear word. Nobody else could make head nor tale of it to tell the truth and, as my own cloth square resembled the inner workings of a burst golf ball, I thought it prudent to keep a low profile.

So, by the looks of things, it was a similar state of affairs four millennia ago - women and girls were more skilled at conjuring works of beauty from lines of thread.

Don't worry, though, lads, we'll have our day - wait until they discover the four-thousand-year-old ash trays. Ours were miles better.

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