The Wampanoag People

Current articles in this section:

1. Maushop Brings His People Home: Dugout Canoe Trip to Martha's Vineyard

2. Holistic History: Including the Wampanoag in a New Exhibit at Plimoth Plantation

3. Stitches in Time: Traditional Wampanoag Sewing

4. Ancient Technology: Building a Wampanoag Home of the 17th Century

Stitches in Time: Archaeology, Women's Technology and Traditional Wampanoag Sewing

by Karin Goldstein, Curator of Original Collections

While the word “technology” is often associated with men’s activities such as building, the crafts traditionally thought of as “women’s work” involve just as much technology as do building and construction. Sewing is an aspect of women’s technology common to both the Native and English cultures of 17th-century Plymouth.

Traces of everyday tasks like sewing and mending seldom last through the ages, while archaeological evidence, such as tools and fasteners made of stone and metal, survive in the ground. Plimoth Plantation’s archaeology collections include several sewing-related artifacts. These artifacts provide just one of the many sources that Plimoth Plantation artisans use both to create accurate reproductions and to preserve traditional technologies.

Traditional Wampanoag Sewing

In traditional Wampanoag culture, women’s crafts included horticulture, cooking, tanning hides, sewing, weaving and basket making. Young women learned these skills from their elders.

Perhaps the most complex part of making clothing was tanning hides. While deer hide was most commonly used for clothing, other skins and furs were used as well. According to Wampanoag Indian Program (WIP) Women’s Technology Specialist, Erin Saulnier, “if we hunted it, we could make clothes out of it.” Women removed hair and flesh from the animal skin using scrapers made of deer bone or stone. Deer hide was tanned using the brain of the animal. Women applied the tanning material with wooden paddles, which not only worked the brain into the hide, but also stretched the skin at the same time. When saturated, the tanning was wrung from the hide as the hide was stretched and kneaded. This long process “made garments that lasted,” said Saulnier.

While evidence of the actual tanning process seldom survives archaeologically, stone scrapers and knives used in preparing and cutting the hides do. Women used small scrapers with rounded edges, made of stone or quahog shell, for processing hides. Stone scrapers were hafted onto handles made of wood, bone or antler, with bark or cord to hold the blade in place, as seen in the reproduction tools used at the Wampanoag Homesite.

Once the hide was prepared, it was cut to the size and shape of the garment using a stone knife hafted onto a handle. The stone scrapers and knives were knapped from local materials, such as quartz, rhyolite and felsite. Making tools is usually thought to have been men’s work but archaeologists are beginning to theorize that women may have made basic tools for their own use. Joan Avant, WIP Research Assistant, concurs. “There’s oral history indicating that women often made the tools they used,” she says.

When sewing hide into a garment, such as a pair of leggings or moccasinash (moccasins), women used sinew, a thread made from the tendon of a deer, to sew the seam. Bone awls were employed to punch holes in the hide and push the sinew through. Worked bone, which is often found on local Native sites, is a logical material for making awls. Awls are usually several inches long, with a sharpened point at one end, and are mainly made of the leg bone of a deer. Needles, used in weaving cattail mats, are made from deer rib bone with a hole perforated in the center.

These artifacts are difficult to date, as they are part of traditional technologies used for thousands of years. In fact, many of the technologies have been passed down through families into modern times. “I learned traditional crafts from members of my family,” said Avant.

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