Prehistoric American Clothing

What Survives of Early Clothing in the Americas?

Early American clothing drew on both animal skins and plant fibers. The strongest direct evidence on this page comes from archaeological finds: fiber sandals in western North America and cotton textiles on Peru's coast.^16,2 Later Indigenous clothing traditions illustrate materials and techniques, while the captions distinguish historic garments from prehistoric finds.

Great Basin Fiber Sandals

Fort Rock-style sandals from caves in the northern Great Basin were made by twining plant fibers into a sole and toe flap. Directly dated examples span roughly 10,500 to 9,200 years before present, using calibrated radiocarbon dates. Several examples are made from sagebrush bark, and a dated sandal from Cougar Mountain Cave uses tule.¹⁶

These finds show that early clothing materials included carefully worked plant fibers as well as hides. Farther south, Huaca Prieta's much later cotton textiles preserve evidence of another textile tradition, including indigo dyeing, discussed below.² For a global comparison of tools, garments, and dating methods, see when clothes were invented.

Animal Hides and Northern Traditions

The earliest inhabitants of the Americas most likely entered from northeast Asia across the Beringia land bridge, exposed when Ice Age glaciers lowered sea levels, and living in that cold north required tailored clothing made from animal hides and furs.¹¹ In the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, survival depended on expertly tailored garments: caribou hide parkas, fur-lined boots, and mittens stitched with sinew thread using bone needles.^5,6 These garments were not crude wrappings but precisely fitted pieces designed to trap body heat — principles of layered insulation that remain effective today.^5,6

Across the temperate zones of North America, indigenous peoples developed diverse clothing traditions suited to their environments. On the Great Plains, bison hides provided robes and moccasins, processed through laborious cycles of scraping, braining, and smoking to produce soft, durable robes and hides (soft-tanned deerskin is known as buckskin).^12,15 In the woodlands of eastern North America, garments were made of tanned deerskin: before European contact, Ojibwe clothing was decorated with dyed porcupine quills or moose hair, shells, copper, bone, and animal teeth.¹³ In warmer southern regions, clothing was lighter: among the Timucua of Florida, as early European observers described them, men wore a loincloth, and women wore a similar wrap with an upper covering usually made of deerskin or Spanish moss.¹⁴

Early Cotton and Agave Fibers in Mesoamerica and South America

The Americas were an independent center of cotton domestication.^2,4 In South America, the site of Huaca Prieta on the coast of Peru has yielded cotton textiles roughly 6,000 years old (one indigo-dyed fragment is about 6,200 years old), among the oldest decorated cotton fabrics known in the Americas.^1,2 These early Peruvian weavers produced remarkably sophisticated fabrics, most of them made by twining — twisting pairs of weft threads around the warp threads by hand — alongside a smaller number of plain-woven cloths.^2,3 Some Huaca Prieta textiles feature complex geometric and figural designs, including depictions of condors, snakes, and crabs, demonstrating that textile art was already highly developed in this early period.³

In Mesoamerica, agave fibers (known as ixtle) and cotton, which Mesoamericans domesticated independently (remains from the Tehuacán Valley date to roughly 5,500–4,300 years ago), were both woven into textiles in prehistoric times.^4,8,9 Agave fibers were extracted from the leaves and pounded so that the tough, durable fibers could be spun and woven into cloth, sandals, and cordage.^8,9,10 In the Andes, indigenous communities also domesticated camelids — llamas and alpacas, the alpaca some 6,000–7,000 years ago — and their soft wool became a prized textile fiber alongside cotton.⁷ The dual tradition of plant and animal fibers in South America laid the foundation for the extraordinary textile traditions of later Andean civilizations, whose weavings would rank among the finest produced anywhere in the ancient world.

Sources

1. GW Researcher Identifies Oldest Textile Dyed Indigo — GW Today, George Washington University, 2016.Reference 1
2. Early pre-Hispanic use of indigo blue in Peru — Jeffrey C. Splitstoser, Tom D. Dillehay, Jan Wouters & Ana Claro, Science Advances, 2016.
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3. The Murúa Code — Natural History Magazine (on Junius Bird's and Milica Skinner's analysis of the Huaca Prieta textiles at the American Museum of Natural History).
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4. Multiple domestication events explain the origin of Gossypium hirsutum landraces in Mexico — Vega et al., Ecology and Evolution, 2023.
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5. Caribou Skin Clothing — Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve, National Park Service.
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6. Traditional Clothing — Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada, Canadian Geographic.
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7. Genomic analysis of the domestication and post-Spanish conquest evolution of the llama and alpaca — Ruiwen Fan et al., Genome Biology, 2020.Reference 1
8. Special Types of Weaving — Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, University of Oklahoma.
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9. Backstrap Loom Heritage — Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico, Google Arts & Culture.
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10. Day 74: 200 Objects in 200 Days — University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (agave-fiber sandal from Frightful Cave, Coahuila, c. 5000 BCE).Reference 1
11. Beringia — Richard E. Morlan, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2006 (updated 2015).Reference 1
12. Bison Hunters — Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, University of Oklahoma (educational program vocabulary sheet).Reference 1
13. Ojibwe Applied Decoration — TRC Needles, Textile Research Centre, Leiden, 2017.Reference 1
14. Timucuan Ways of Life — Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve, National Park Service.Reference 1
15. Dress Among Plains Indian Women — William Curtis Farabee, The Museum Journal (Penn Museum), 1921.Reference 1
16. The World's Oldest Shoes — Thomas J. Connolly, University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History (Fort Rock-style sandals, materials, and calibrated radiocarbon dates).
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