Your Backyard Hammock Has a 4,000-Year-Old History and Helped Shape the Americas
You may remember lying in a hammock during summer camp, or you might even have one in your own backyard. But have you ever wondered where they come from?
A new study in Post-medieval tells the story of the hammock, an indigenous technology often overlooked by researchers. What may look like a simple sleeping net is actually a complex material object that can teach us a lot about the history of Indigenous and European colonizers.
Learn more: How Native Oral Tradition Guides Archeology and Uncovers Climate History in Alaska
How were hammocks made?
Artistic interpretation of a hospitality ritual in a hammock. Created by André Thevet, The singularities of France Antarctica (Paris, 1588), 85-87.
(Image credit: Huntington Library, San Marino, California)
Hammocks originated in the Caribbean and South America and were typically woven by women who had mastered the skills of fiber work. Fiber workers used threads made from palm and cotton trees and wove them by hand or used a loom to create the hammocks.
As co-author John Kuhn explains in a press release, these materials are partly responsible for the hammock being an oft-forgotten element of material culture:
“The oldest preserved specimen is 4,000 years old, but it may actually be much older. We just don’t know; textiles don’t preserve well in the tropics.”
Working with fibers was not the only know-how highlighted in the manufacture of hammocks. Making a hammock requires a wide range of skills, including agroforestry, dyeing, weaving, cleaning and architecture.
What were indigenous cultures used for?
Although indigenous cultures often used hammocks for sleeping, they also used them for a wide range of cultural practices. Hammocks were intimately linked to a person’s self-expression and interests, as they were used as private spaces where people could chat or practice their favorite pastimes.
According to a Kalinago-French dictionary, the word “hammock” comes from indigenous words meaning “placenta” and “uterus”. Babies were often placed in a hammock after birth and they remained a place of comfort and security throughout life.
Hammocks also played an important role in religious ceremonies and practices. They were sometimes used as burial shrouds, as well as a place where shamans lay down to go into trance and communicate with spirits.
Hammocks and colonization
From the beginning of the colonial project in the Western Hemisphere in the 15th century, European colonizers recognized the hammock as an invaluable technology for indigenous peoples. Europeans were likely introduced to the hammock as part of hospitality practices, and they immediately adopted the technology.
Hammocks are comfortable for sleeping because they are breathable in the sweltering heat of the tropics and are more effective in helping people avoid insects than the sleeping pads used by Europeans. These factors made hammocks a commonly used technology by Europeans during their military expeditions to the Americas. The technology was so beneficial to soldiers during these expeditions that English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh wrote home and suggested that hammocks be adopted for European missions as well.
Unfortunately, like chocolate and tobacco, the hammock became another element of indigenous culture that was co-opted without consideration by European colonizers. The research team hopes their hammock story will inspire people to think more about where these technologies come from and how they challenge the belief that indigenous technologies are inferior to those of the colonizers.
“Sometimes people have the idea that indigenous cultures were simply destroyed, and they are not necessarily seen as huge technological contributors to the Atlantic world that emerged from colonization. The next time you see a hammock, just take a minute to marvel at the ingenuity of the cultures from which it came,” Kuhn concluded.
Learn more: The Florentine Codex describes the beginnings of Aztec life and is now accessible online
Article sources
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