Stitches in Time by Roger Hainsworth. Urumchi stands on the southern wing of the fabled Silk Road which traversed Asia from China to the Middle East from at least the second century BC. It is the capital of the Uyghur Autonomous province in the far west of the Chinese Republic. Set on the edge of the largely desert Tarim Basin, it houses a museum containing remarkable exhibits: a number of mummified bodies of great antiquity. One of the oldest is the so-called Beauty of Loulan. She was interred about the time of Abraham, or rather earlier than the construction of the more elaborate phase of Stonehenge, that is, about 4,000 years ago. Another, popularly know as Cherchen Man, dates from about 3,000 years ago. We are accustomed to mummies from Ancient Egypt but these are far better preserved than are the bodies of the pharoahs and their courtiers. Moreover, their disconcerting appearance of having recently walked the earth is reinforced by their clothing which the dry conditions have preserved as effectively as they have preserved their wearers and is often still richly coloured. Interestingly these representatives of a very ancient people, although their precise race is still debated, appear Caucasian with no Mongoloid features, fair-haired and, it is believed, were probably blue-eyed. They were also very tall. Cherchen Man, who was buried with three other women, one of them as well preserved as himself, is six feet six inches tall. Some of the women were at least six feet tall. The mummies were not buried with rich grave goods although the clothing interred with them would have been among the most valuable possessions of a people who wandered the steppe with their flocks and herds. It was this clothing which attracted Dr. Barber to these remote exhibits. A lecturer at Occidental College, California, she is the author of Prehistoric Textiles a study of Neolithic and Bronze Age cloth found in the Aegean and a more popular study Women's Work: the First 20,000 Years. She examined as closely as she could through the plexiglass covers of the cases the remarkably skilled techniques of these early weavers and stitchers. She was also allowed to examine some clothing recovered from tombs where the corpses had perished or which had simply been interred as grave goods. Her analysis of the techniques involved would be of considerable value to anyone interested in the history of clothing or fashion. Unfortunately here the archaeology is disappointing because although Dr. Barber could examine in detail clothing excavated from the mummies' graves she was not permitted to penetrate the storerooms in which they were kept to make her own selections. Moreover so far as the mummies were concerned she was usually only allowed to see what any visitor would see. There is considerable frustration in Dr. Barber's analysis of the clothing at times because she could not see what happened to the weave as it passed out of sight beneath the body, what form the underclothing took, and how the seams were sown from within. For the detailed archaeological examination of both corpses, clothing and accessaries we must look elsewhere. This is simultaneously a fascinating and a disappointing book. The archaeology disappoints because no archaeology in the usual sense is directly experienced. Indeed the most significant portions of the book - the analysis of the techniques of weaving, sewing and design of clothing - could probably have been contained in a well illustrated article in the National Geographic. To turn these slender resources into a book has required a great deal of padding and so while we came for mummies we are detained by chapter after chapter which begins cogently but soon wanders off into a discussion about human origins, and much highly speculative discussion about the origins of the Urumchi mummies and the identity of their more recent descendants. If we can believe Dr. Barber, and I doubt that we can, these may include the inhabitants of Celtic Ireland. Thus we are given repetitive discourses about the peoples of central Asia, the successive advances and retreats of the Steppe peoples toward Europe and China, even the wanderings of Alexander the Great, some interesting accounts of such explorers as Sven Hedin and Sir Aurel Stein. These are all interspersed with maps and diagrams illustrating such diverse topics as Central Asia's peculiar drainage system, the vagaries of the position of the Lop Nor "lake" over the centuries, and the slowly developing vocal tracts of humanoids and their simian ancestors. These diversions are often interesting and stimulating but we are not always persuaded of their relevance. Moreover they crop up among several chapters rather than being collected into one coherent whole. The structure is difficult to discern. Dr Barber has been ill-served by her publisher's editor. Infelicitous slang disfigures the text. There are signs of hurried production - for example the error of having the numbering of the plates in the text differ from the numbering of the plates themselves. Happily the book contains scattered nuggets of information, some of which are illuminating, some of which could persuade us to pursue further enquiries in her enticing bibliography. Others are delightfully unexpected. For instance, those who assumed the "Silk Road" was an English translation of some ancient name from Latin or perhaps Chinese will discover that it is simply a translation of "Seidenstrasse", a term coined by the nineteenth century explorer, Ferdinand Baron von Richthofen, a kinsman of Snoopy's old opponent, the "Red Baron".
