Circa 100 BCE-350 CE, in today’s Sudan, the Kushite people of the Meroitic kingdom assembled long strands of cotton threads to create lattice works of elaborate design at the bottom of clothing and furnishing textiles. These openwork borders concluded the weave of large fabrics woven on the warp-weighted loom. Their ubiquity in the textile corpus of the Meroitic period makes these openworks a classic fixture of Meroitic weaving practices, reflected through iconography in other media as well.
In 1984 and 1998, the renowned Nubian textiles experts Elisabeth Crowfoot and Nettie K. Adams studied the Meroitic openwork technique developed at Qasr Ibrim and compared it with other openworks from the Bronze Age site of Kerma (Crowfoot 1984, Adams 1998). Highlighting their common decorative vocabulary, the authors proposed to see the two techniques as different manifestations of the same craft tradition. Twenty years later, the present authors reexamined this hypothesis using an interdisciplinary approach based on the meeting of textile studies with experimental archaeology. Bringing heads and hands together, this project and the present article provided the opportunity to reconstruct and understand the manufacture and history of this remarkable technique.