Investigating cultural evolution using phylogenetic analysis: the origins and descent of the southeast Asian tradition of warp ikat weaving.

Christopher D Buckley,Alex Mesoudi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0052064

Abstract

The warp ikat method of making decorated textiles is one of the most geographically widespread in southeast Asia, being used by Austronesian peoples in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and Daic peoples on the Asian mainland. In this study a dataset consisting of the decorative characters of 36 of these warp ikat weaving traditions is investigated using Bayesian and Neighbornet techniques, and the results are used to construct a phylogenetic tree and taxonomy for warp ikat weaving in southeast Asia. The results and analysis show that these diverse traditions have a common ancestor amongst neolithic cultures the Asian mainland, and parallels exist between the patterns of textile weaving descent and linguistic phylogeny for the Austronesian group. Ancestral state analysis is used to reconstruct some of the features of the ancestral weaving tradition. The widely held theory that weaving motifs originated in the late Bronze Age Dong-Son culture is shown to be inconsistent with the data.

Highlights

Southeast Asia possesses diverse textile weaving traditions, some of the most impressive achievements of which are represented in public and private collections worldwide and which have recently been the subject of several major exhibitions and publications [1,2,3]
In this study my aims are to answer some of the questions that were raised in the Introduction, : 1. Do the ikat weaving traditions of Southeast Asia share a common origin?
The Neighbornet plot (Fig.6) has a starfish-like shape, with weaving traditions mostly falling into clusters along the ‘arms’, indicating that the data contains resolvable structure

Summary

Introduction

Southeast Asia possesses diverse textile weaving traditions, some of the most impressive achievements of which are represented in public and private collections worldwide and which have recently been the subject of several major exhibitions and publications [1,2,3]. Warp ikat (together with supplementary warp patterning) was, until recently, still made using locally sourced bast and leaf fibers in a few areas, notably Hainan Island, Mindanao and Tanimbar. These materials were the main source of fiber for textile making before the advent of cotton and silk to the region

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion