Spindle-whorls are first to be considered. These are essentially
prehistoric utensils, and are to be found in every part of the world where
the inhabitants were sufficiently cultured to make twisted threads or
cords, whether for hunting or fishing, games, textile fabrics, or
coverings, either for themselves, their tents, or other purposes. In
western Asia, all of Europe, in the pueblos of North America, and among
the aborigines--by whatever name they are called--of Mexico, Central
America, and the north and west coast of South America, wherever the
aborigines employed cord, cloth, or fiber, the spindle-whorl is found.
Where they used skins for the coverings of themselves or their tents, the
spindle-whorl may not be found. Thus, in the Eskimo land, and among
certain of the North American savages, spindle-whorls are rarely if ever
found.
The spindle-whorl was equally in use in Europe and Asia during the
Neolithic Age as in the Bronze Age. It continued in use among the peasants
in remote and outlying districts into modern times. During the Neolithic
Age its materials were stone and terra cotta; during the Bronze Age they
were almost exclusively terra cotta. They are found of both materials.
Recently a Gallo-Roman tomb was opened at Clermont-Ferrand and found to
contain the skeleton of a young woman, and with it her spindles and
whorls.[312]
The existence of spindle-whorls in distant and widely separated countries
affords a certain amount of presumptive evidence of migrations of peoples
from one country to another, or of contact or communication between them.
If the people did not themselves migrate and settle the new country,
taking the spindle-whorls and other objects with them, then the
spindle-whorl itself, or the knowledge of how to make and use it, must in
some other way have gotten over to the new country.
This argument of migration, contact, or communication does not rest solely
on the similarity of the whorls in the distant countries, but equally on
the fact of spinning thread from the fiber; and this argument is
reenforced by the similarity of the operation and of the tool or machine
with which it was done. It has been said elsewhere that the probability of
communication between widely separated peoples by migration or contact
depended for its value as evidence, in some degree, upon the
correspondence or similarity of the object considered, and that this value
increased with the number of items of correspondence, the closeness of
similarity, the extent of the occurrence, and the difficulty of its
performance. So we pass to the similarity in size, appearance, mode of
manufacture, and, finally, the use of the whorls of the two continents.