Above: Coiled copper-alloy wire necklace discovered at Harappa in 2000 with traces of silk fibers preserved on the inside
Abstract
Silk is an important economic fibre, and is generally considered to have been the exclusive cultural heritage of China. Silk weaving is evident from the Shang period c. 1600–1045 BC , hough the earliest evidence for silk textiles in ancient China may date to as much as a millennium earlier. Recent microscopic analysis of archaeological thread fragments found inside copper-alloy ornaments from Harappa and steatite beads from Chanhu-daro, two important Indus sites, have yielded silk fibres, dating to c. 2450–2000 BC . This study offers the earliest evidence in the world for any silk outside China, and is roughly contemporaneous with the earliest Chinese evidence for silk. This important new finding brings into question the traditional historical notion of sericulture as being an exclusively Chinese invention.
Also included is a response to Ji-Huan He:
"We are grateful for the opportunity to hear readers’ views concerning our joint paper on archaeological evidence for early silk in the Indus Civilization (Good et al. 2009), and are equally grateful for the opportunity to respond to one particular reader’s comments on our findings: Mr Ji-Huan He (2010), who writes ‘Silk is of China and China is of Silk’."