Basket weaving

• 1. Introduction

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  Basket weaving is one of the oldest crafts in human history, and yet no one can say exactly when it began. The materials that ancient hands wove together, grasses and bark and vine stems, decay too readily to leave a reliable record. What survives instead are shadows: impressions pressed into clay, tools whose purpose archaeologists must infer, and the living traditions of communities that have woven in the same ways for thousands of years. The oldest baskets ever recovered were found in Faiyum, in upper Egypt, and carbon dating places them between 10,000 and 12,000 years old. That predates pottery. Before people had fired vessels, they had baskets. The questions that follow are not just about craft. They concern where people first wove, what they wove with, why basket making nearly disappeared in places, and how a Swedish minister in KwaZulu-Natal ended up saving an art form from extinction.

• 2. Before Pottery

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  Faiyum's ancient baskets sit in a particular historical position. Pottery vessels, though they eventually replaced baskets for many storage tasks, were too heavy and fragile to suit people who moved across large distances hunting and gathering. Baskets were portable, flexible, and made from whatever materials grew nearby. That practical advantage explains why weaving technology spread so widely before any other container-making tradition took hold.

  The challenge for anyone trying to trace basket weaving through history is the very material that made baskets useful. Pine, grass, willow, hide, vine: all of it breaks down over centuries. At sites across the Middle East, researchers have found not baskets themselves but their outlines. At Tell Sabi Abyad II and Catalhoyuk, impressions left on floor surfaces and on fragments of bitumen tell researchers that baskets were used for storage and for architectural purposes during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic phases. The site of Nahal Hemar, a ritual cave preserved in remarkable condition from the Early Neolithic period, yielded thousands of intact perishable artefacts, including basketry containers, fabrics, and cordage.

  Neolithic basketry impressions have also been uncovered at a range of sites including Tell es-Sultan, the ancient settlement at Jericho, as well as Netiv HaGdud, Beidha, Jarmo, and Ali Kosh. The most common evidence of weaving knowledge found at archaeological sites is an imprint of the weave on fragments of clay pots, formed when people packed clay against the walls of a basket before firing. The baskets were gone; only the negative space of their patterns remained.

• 3. Four Techniques

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  Basketry can be divided into four distinct types, each shaped by the material it depends on. Coiled basketry uses grasses, rushes, and pine needles. Plaiting uses wide, braid-like materials, palms, yucca, and New Zealand flax. Twining, a technique used in most wicker baskets, involves two or more flexible weaving elements crossing each other as they pass through stiffer radial spokes. Wicker and splint basketry uses reed, cane, willow, oak, and ash.

  Reed, also called rattan core, has become one of the more popular materials in contemporary practice because it is widely available and can be cut to any size or shape a pattern requires. Flat reed is used for most square baskets; oval reed for many round ones; round reed for twining. Reed can also be dyed to resemble oak or hickory, which are harder to source. For weavers working with traditional materials, black ash is particularly significant in New England and the Great Lakes regions, where baskets woven from its splints have long cultural and functional roots.

  The process of building a basket begins with the base, which can be woven from reed or made from wood. Once the base is established, the static pieces are laid down: in a round basket these are called spokes; in other shapes, stakes or staves. The weavers then fill in the sides. Changing the size, colour, or placement of a weave style generates a wide range of patterns. To achieve a multi-coloured effect, some Aboriginal artists first dye the twine and then weave the twines together in complex arrangements.

• 4. Materials Across Continents

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  Willow was prized in England for the ease with which it could be grown, harvested, and bent; willow baskets were commonly referred to as wickerwork. Vines offered a different advantage: runners, which tend to grow straighter than vine stems, could be split, dried for storage, and then soaked or boiled before use to restore pliability. Kudzu vine, for example, sits on the pliable end of the range; bittersweet, grapevine, wisteria, and smokevine are more rigid but equally workable.

  In parts of Nigeria, a group in Ibadan led by Achenyo Idachaba turned to water hyacinth, a plant that had become a serious pest in local waterways, as a base material for handicrafts. Using an invasive species as a raw material gave weavers a supply that was both abundant and actively beneficial to remove.

  In the Pacific islands of Polynesia, basketry relies on pandanus, coconut fibre, hibiscus fibre, and New Zealand flax, chosen according to local custom and availability. In South Asia, palm-based basket weaving has a long tradition in Tamil Nadu and surrounding states, where palms grow abundantly. Across East Asia, bamboo is the primary basketry material in Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean traditions. In Japan, bamboo weaving is registered as a traditional practice within the range of fine and decorative arts. Northwest Coast peoples in North America use spruce root, cedar bark, and swampgrass, with ceremonial basketry hats made by women and painted by men still worn at potlatches today.

• 5. Living Weavers

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  Louisa Keyser, known as Dat So La Lee of the Washoe people, is arguably the most famous Native American weaver. Lena Frank Dick, also Washoe and born in 1889, followed Keyser by one generation; her baskets were frequently mistaken for Keyser's. Both women worked in coiled basketry, a form particularly associated with Indigenous peoples of California and the Great Basin.

  Delores Churchill is a Haida weaver from Alaska who began working at a time when Haida basketry was in serious decline. She and others kept the tradition alive by teaching younger generations. The double-weave technique practiced by Southeastern peoples, including the Atakapa, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chitimacha, is considered particularly difficult: each basket is formed by an interior and exterior wall seamlessly woven together. Mike Dart of the Cherokee Nation still practices doubleweave today.

  Mary Jackson is a world-famous African-American sweetgrass basket weaver. In 2008, she was named a MacArthur Fellow for her work. Elizabeth F. Kinlaw, another North American sweetgrass basketweaver, has had work displayed in the Smithsonian Institution. In northwestern Mexico, the Seri people continue to sew baskets using splints of the limberbush plant, Jatropha cuneata. In Greece, basket weaving is practiced by the anchorite monks of Mount Athos. In 2025, the basketry of Poland was inscribed in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List.

• 6. Revival in KwaZulu-Natal

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  Zulu baskets from the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa were traditionally made for utilitarian purposes: holding water, beer, or food. Each basket can take many months to weave. Starting in the late 1960s, the art form was dying. The introduction of tin and plastic water containers had removed the practical demand that had kept the craft alive, and at one point only three elderly women still knew how to make them.

  Kjell Lofroth, a Swedish minister living in South Africa at the time, noticed the decline. After a drought struck the KwaZulu-Natal province, he formed the Vukani Arts Association, a name that translates from Zulu as "wake up and get going." The association provided financial support to single women and their families, and those three remaining weavers taught others, bringing the craft back. Beauty Ngxongo is today considered the most renowned living Zulu basket weaver.

  Contemporary Zulu weavers have also developed telephone wire baskets, often brightly colored and made with telephone wire, sometimes from recycled sources, as a substitute for native grasses. The Wolof baskets of Senegal show a parallel evolution: traditionally woven from thin cuts of palm frond and a thick grass called njodax, contemporary versions often incorporate plastic or repurposed prayer mat materials. The Ngarrindjeri women of southern South Australia use sedge grasses near the lakes and mouth of the Murray River for coiled basketry, a tradition practiced for centuries across the continent by Aboriginal Australian women.