Culture: Since weaving cloth is a cottage industry in preindustrial societies, every home would weave cloth and sew clothing. Mormon’s specific mention of it in the context of wealth and abundance connotes the women’s ability to create a surplus, thus creating a medium of exchange by which wealth could be accumulated. The Codex Mendoza is a record of the Aztec tribute lists, and was prepared for the Spanish conquerors. Although it long postdates the Book of Mormon, it contains a drawing of the woman’s backstrap loom, which certainly had not changed much over that time period. Anthropologists Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt describe the common loom:
Backstrap loom: iquitihualoni. A backstrap loom is made up of an assemblage of simple, smooth sticks of various lengths and widths which become a working loom only after the warp threads, having been wrapped around the strings that run along the top and bottom beams, are placed under tension. This is done by attaching the upper bar, the warp beam, to a tree or post with a cord and securing the other bar, the cloth beam, to the weaver by means of the backstrap. Because the backstrap fits tightly around the weaver, she can control the degree of tension placed on the threads by the cant of her body. The horizontal weft threads are then passed through the alternate vertical warps with a bobbin and are beaten down into place with a batten, the long weaving stock.
The Codex Mendoza frequently lists woven cloth as part of the tribute due the Aztec lords in Tenochtitlan (the site of modern Mexico City).
Reference: Because Mesoamerica had no flax, the Nephites could not have produced the “fine twined linen” common in the Old World. I consider this passage another instance of Joseph Smith’s translation of a term on the plates into language that his nineteenth-century audience would understand. “Fine-twined” reflects his familiarity with the King James Version of the Bible:
And for the gate of the court shall be an hanging of twenty cubits, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, wrought with needlework: and their pillars shall be four, and their sockets four.…
The length of the court shall be an hundred cubits, and the breadth fifty every where, and the height five cubits of fine twined linen, and their sockets of brass. (Exod. 27:16, 18)
Sorenson suggests that Joseph used “linen” to refer to a Mesoamerican equivalent:
Linen is defined as a cloth, often quite stiffish and hard-wearing, made of fibers from flax or hemp plants prepared by soaking and pounding. Although the flax plant was apparently not known in pre-Spanish America, several fabrics were made from vegetable fabrics that look and feel much like European linen. One was made from fibers (called henequen) of the leaf of the ixtle (maguey or agave plant), but fibers from the yucca and other plants gave similar results. Conquistador Bernal Diaz said of henequen garments that they were “like linen.” Bark cloth, made by stripping bark from the fig tree and soaking and pounding it, was common in Mesoamerica and also has some of the characteristics of linen.