Oral Paper

         Ethnobotany

Fiber optics: decoding plant choice for felted-fiber products like barkcloth, paper, and amate

Presenting Author
James Ojascastro
Description
Felted plant-based fiber products are one of humanity’s oldest innovations, dating back nearly ten millennia.  By manipulating the arrangement of different plant fibers and the hydrogen bonds between them through physical (beating) and chemical (cooking) means, a great variety of flat, pliable, felted materials can be generated.  Such materials are believed to have been first used for clothing (as barkcloth, since ca. 8000 BCE) and then for writing, as both paper (since ca. 100 BCE) and amate (since ca. 70 CE).  Despite convincing assertions that felted plant-based writing materials are a direct descendant of felted plant-based textiles, there is almost no overlap across the species that are each used today for barkcloth, handmade paper, and amate—save for the singular counterexample, paper mulberry.  Since research by the paper industry has shown that fiber physiology strongly influences the properties of the resulting paper, it is plausible to predict that the tailoring of species for either barkcloth, paper, or amate is related to the underlying microanatomy of the fibers.  Alternatively, it is possible that the choice of fiber for barkcloth, paper, or amate is simply a product of the varied and complex biogeographies of plants and cultures, and felted-fiber plants could experimentally be rendered into serviceable barkcloth, paper, or amate interchangeably. In this paper, we test these hypotheses through multivariate functional trait analyses and experimental manufacture of paper, barkcloth, and amate.