Theories of cultural transmission before the Silk Road between Europe & Asia may pan out?

Before the Silk Road cultures!?!

I happened across the "Trollen Braid" controversy on the Norsefolk Yahoo! list and was intrigued, so I did a little Google digging. I'll state beforehand that this isn't conclusive research (or even very professional at that) and to please not be spreading this around as fact.

However, you could use it to warn people away from claiming that Trollen Braiding Wheels, as they're now being called in the reenacting world, are period. They are probably not within the SCA period, and most of the information regarding the wheels themselves is a garbled, internets version of the "Telephone" game.


The files that intrigued me initially:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Norsefolk_2/files/Clothing%20and%20Textiles/Brenna/
If you can't see them, just sign up for the list. It's a really good hardcore medievalist list with very prominent members from the academic world and reenacting world. It's not SCA-exclusive, however, and they try to stay away from solely SCA-related discussion since not everybody is a SCAdian.

There is also a huge discussion in the archives regarding these files, so check that out too.


Googling:

I Googled and came up with this:
http://www.kelticos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&p=7632
This blog post that led to the abstract below.

http://textilesociety.org/abstracts_2002/Barber.htm
Abstract. If anyone knows where I can read the actual paper, please let me know.


Googling on the "Trollen"braid again:

The Trollen Braid:

http://www.robinsonhistorical.co.uk/images/Work%20Sheets/Braided%20Cord.pdf
A how-to, showing a marudai-like weaving board and similar techniques


However! (And there's always a however)

http://etimage.com/english/bearingdial/bearingdial.html
This site states that the wheels claimed by reenactors to be for weaving were probably for sea navigation. Personally, I'm apt to agree with them since one was found in Greenland (very difficult to navigate to, according to The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown), and they are not broken in half as reenactors have assumed.

Also, "Tools for Textile Production from Birka and Hedeby. Birka Studies 8" by Eva Andersson (the premier source for textile artifacts in that region for the Iron and Viking Ages), makes no mention of these wheels. I'm also apt to side with the expert, especially since one of the wheels was found at Haithabu (Hedeby).

And, the big name herself, Else Ostergard of the Danish National Museum, has said through (hearsay) conversation with a European reenactor [http://www.et-tu.com/soper/cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=forum&board=open&op=display&num=105&start=30] that the disk was found in Trelleborg, Sweden rather than Trelleborg, Denmark (Trollen) and is probably 17th century in extraction. This hints that it is a post-our-era tool find as well as probably culturally transmitted from Japan or China along the silk road or through overseas trade routes rather than in earlier eras through casual contact and eventual cultural dissemination in the Eurasian deserts.


But that leaves out the braids themselves!

It could be some form of whipcording (what is often called Viking Battle Braiding or slyngyng similar in our community, also not very documentable in an extant tool sense, though the braid structures are, apparently, but I digress).
http://www.northernneedle.net/Research/whipcord.pdf

However, the much more practical and sedate method of fingerloop braiding is the more probable culprit.

http://www.stringpage.com/braid/fl/fingerloop.html
This site cites a book on Japanese fingerloop braiding and that brings it all back full circle!

The way the above page is written is some reason to suspect (so that I don't get caught in an endless loop of trailing down sources of everything, I'll just propose it and stop there), that fingerloop braiding is documentable to the Medieval period in Europe, and not the earlier Iron or Viking Ages--Pre-Silk Road.


To sum up my thoughts on the tl;dr:

Since it's possible to create the structures of these braids in several ways (from top down on kumihimo marudai and the so-called Trollen disks to bottom up with whipcording and fingerloop braiding) it's reasonable to make a preliminary case, as without publishing or claiming authenticity, that the artistic and practical uses for these braids were known to cultures in Europe and Asia through their contacts in the Pre-Silk Road era. It doesn't necessarily mean that this was the transmission method--it could be that these things developed naturally in fiber cultures.

-Jorun