When you’re swaying in a beachside hammock on a lazy summer day, take a moment to thank the Indigenous cultures that invented it.

Native to South America and the Caribbean, hammocks were traditionally woven by women, who were frequently fiber-workers in Indigenous cultures, said Binghamton University Associate Professor of English John Kuhn, who recently co-authored an article on the topic.

“The oldest preserved specimen is 4,000 years old, but they may actually be much older,” said Kuhn, who also directs the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Binghamton. “We just don’t know; textiles don’t preserve well in the tropics.”

Co-authored by Marcy Norton at the University of Pennsylvania, “Towards a history of the hammock: An Indigenous technology in the Atlantic world” recently appeared in postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies.

Portable, versatile and easy to clean, hammocks are a comfortable way to sleep in a hot climate. They also protect the user from insects, especially when compared to the ground-based bedding common to European colonizers.

“Colonists basically adopt them right from the jump,” Kuhn said. “They learn to use them because the hammock was a major component in hospitality rituals that are being extended to them by Indigenous groups who are seeking alliance and friendship.”

The technology proved useful for military expeditions in the Americas and was adopted by figures such as English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. As colonial settlements began to develop, their use was adopted by a wider population, from elites to slaves.

Hammocks are also connected to Indigenous culture with deep webs of meaning. In addition to sleep, the bed-slings were used as private spaces to chat, manufacture objects or play music. In short, they were a way to define an individual’s personal space in an otherwise communal culture.

“We know from one Kalinago-French dictionary compiled in the early colonial period that the word for hammock was linguistically linked to the word for placenta,” Kuhn said. “It’s kind of poetic: You’re in one kind of container and then, because hammocks are given to babies right away, you move to another one after you’re born.”

Not only did individuals enter the world in a hammock, they left it in one, too; hammocks were also used as burial shrouds. They even played a role in religious life, as a vessel for healing rituals and trance states in which shamans would commune with spirits.

The spread of hammock use among colonizers belies the common belief that European technology was far superior to that of Indigenous people. It’s far from the only example of cultural borrowing; take chocolate and tobacco, which originated as stimulants developed by Indigenous cultures.

Kuhn is currently working on a book about another Indigenous technology: birchbark canoes, which North American colonists immediately adopted for their own use.

“Sometimes people have this idea that Indigenous cultures were just destroyed, and they aren’t necessarily seen as huge technological contributors to the Atlantic world that emerges out of colonization,” Kuhn said. “The next time you see a hammock, just take a minute to marvel at the ingenuity of the cultures that it sprang from!”

About Binghamton University

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