Motor Skills and the Learning Process: The Conservation of Cordage Final Twist Direction in Communities of Practice

Over the past decade, textile researchers have identified large temporal and geographic regions in the eastern United States in which strong patterns of cordage twist direction existed prehistorically. This work prompted questions about why cordage production processes seem to be so conservative. Recent research demonstrates that handedness, fiber type, and spinning technique probably do not determine cordage twist direction. The results indicate, instead, that participation in communities of practice or learning networks, the automatization of motor skills, and the practicalities of production have important effects. This paper also examines learning and motor-skill development as factors in conservative cordage production behavior and then interprets cordage twist direction distributions in the prehistoric Southeast from this perspective.