Textiles and Clothing

Judging by statements in Mormon’s record, some Book of Mormon peoples considerably emphasized the technology of textiles and clothing (as in Helaman 6:13). Mesoamerican civilization also gave major attention to textiles and clothing. Even in Olmec times, according to Coe and Diehl, stone sculptures show what appear to have been “magnificent textiles” (compare Ether 10:24). In addition to “all manner of good homely cloth” (Alma 1:29), woven so that “we might clothe our nakedness” (Mosiah 10:5), the Nephites made the wore “costly apparel” (Helaman 13:28), including “fine silks” and “fine-twined linen” (Alma 4:6). Sumptuous Mesoamerican clothing is shown in murals, such as those at Bonampak and on Maya painted vases, in codices, and on clay figurines. The only references to textile workers in the Book of Mormon indicates that this was seen as a woman’s task Mosiah 10:5; Helaman 6:13), as was also the case almost universally in Mesoamerica.

References to material termed silk and linen are of specific interest because some critics of the Book of Mormon have considered mention of them to be anachronisms reflecting 19th-century New York authorship of the book, rather than an origin in ancient America. Hence, evidence of the pre-Spanish Mesoamerican manufacture of fabrics comparable to silk and linen is relevant.

Linen is a cloth composed of fibers derived from the flax plant “or similar fabric.” The cloth is a somewhat stiff, hard-wearing fabric. Flax was not cultivated in the Americas, but cloth that looked and felt like flax linen was made. The most common cloth of this kind in Mesoamerica was woven of fiber (henequen) from the left of the agave, or maguey, plant. Fibers of the yucca and other plants gave similar results. Bernal Diaz, one of the Spanish conquerors under Cortez, said that henequen garments of the natives seemed “like linen.”

In Mexico silk was spun from cocoons of wild moths. It was equivalent in early every way to what East Asians produced from thread that came from larvae of the moth Bombyx mori. A different wild moth yielded thread and cloth that the classical Greeks knew as “silk.” But the earliest-known “silk” in the Mediterranean region was from Egypt (ca. 1000 BC), not from China.

Mesoamericans also produced fabrics comparable to silk. In Yucatan, fiber (kapok) from the seed pods of the ceiba tree was gathered and spun into cloth “as soft and delicate, and perhaps more so, than silk.” Another silk-like cloth was made of fiber from the pita floja (silkgrass, Achmea magdalenae) grown in the Guatemalan piedmont. Leaves of the wild pineapple plant supplied yet another silk-like equivalent fiber and cloth. The Aztecs wove silky cloth from the fine hair of the underbelly of rabbits. In addition, the best cotton textiles compared in delicacy with silk; Cortez reported that the Aztec emperor “Moctezuma presented me with a large quantity of articles of cloth, which, though fashioned of cotton and not silk, not be equaled by anything else in the world for texture, richness of colors, and workmanship. They included many marvelous garments for men and women, hangings for beds, incomparably finer than any made of silk.” Fiber excavated from Teotihuacán, 1,000 years earlier than the Aztec civilization, was said also to be “exceedingly fine” and “of gossamer thinness.”

These references perhaps constitute overkill in all the documentation of “silk” textiles in Mesoamerica. I have aimed simply to warn readers that attempts either to deny or assert parallels between a historical source (the Book of Mormon here) and archaeology may remain inconclusive unless pursued to great length. In light of the extensive documentation just presented, the silk and linen mentioned in the Book of Mormon on the one hand and Mesoamerican textile technology on the other surely must be considered valid correspondences.