Well clearly they didn’t have plastic and rubber back in the Bronze Age, or it would have been called the Plastic or Rubber Age. But they may have had a need for things that had a certain give to them. For things like baby teething rings or for making relatively airtight seals around doors. I don’t know if there is any archaeological or historical evidence, but I was wondering if there was any widely used substitute for those substances that we know of … perhaps some sort of wood or plant fiber that was soft and didn’t get all splintery and so forth, or perhaps some kind of leather that worked well when cured properly. Anyone up on this?
This bit of the question makes it sound like “…and how did they access the internet?”…
But anyway…
Pine resin (and other plant gums and resins) was a fairly effective glue and caulk.
Leather and rawhide is flexible and pliable, and can be shaped.
Most of the sort of household containers we make out of plastic can be made from clay, wood, animal skin, horn or bone, or basketwork or cloth if they don’t need to hold liquids.
To the extent that the teething needs of babies was probably recognised, animal bones, bits of hide or sinew/tendon, or strips of dried meat would probably serve pretty well.
Coral was a common material for teething devices before suitable plastics were developed. (Though of course many bronze age societies wouldn’t have had ready access to coral either.)
Ruskhas been a standard teething device for thousands of years and is still commonly used today.
Rubber, gutta percha and various other natural latexes have been in use for thousands of years of course has been known.
For making an airtight seal around a door or container that wasn’t regularly opened, bee’s wax or plant wax was commonly used. For making a seal that was regularly opened, oiled or wet leather was used.
If you wanted something soft that didn’t get all splintery, then leather was usually the best bet. By various treatments such as tanning and boiling,it’s possible to make leather into fairly much any consistency you want, from rigid to almost silken.
Or just a “brush”, still done today. Now they’re usually plastic but so are brooms. It’s a lot of hairs stuck to a strip, and this nailed to the bottom of the door (for some reason this is usually the part which needs to be sealed).
I’ve seen teethers made of wood, and also many people encountering the problem of a baby who isn’t interested in the orthopedic, ergonomic, pediatrician-approved ring but in another object. So long as the object isn’t swallowable, fragile or poisonous, eventually the usual decision is to let the baby use it.
I still have my teething ring. This is a flat ring about two inches diameter and is made of whalebone. Fulfills all the requirements as it’s too big to swallow and just rough enough to work those baby gums. I bet stone age babies were given bones to chomp on.
Pitch was used to make ships water-tight.
Primitive technologist checking in. To expand on the good answers above, pine resin (plus birchbark resin etc.) is flexible when fresh, but very brittle when dry. Adding beeswax to the mix helps here, and tweaking the recipe (with the important addition of charcoal dust) gives a waterproof, airtight material with a wide range of malleability. Labor-intensive and valuable, it was mostly used in small applications: fixing points to their shafts, mending cracks in pottery etc.
Animal skin, in various stages of rawness, has been used for buckets, hinges, rope, armor, shoe soles etc., or precisely where rubber and plastics are in use today. Contrary to popular view, dried rawhide of any real thickness takes a substantial amount of soaking before losing its body and water / air tightness. Very thin rawhide and parchment even saw use as windows.
Stomachs, bladders and scrotums are ready made, almost waterproof, somewhat flexible containers available at every slaughter, aboriginally used for cooking, storing moisture-sensitive hunting and firelighting equipment, floats etc.
Leather (both vegetable and fat-tanned) were in use in Bronze Age societies. Again, a wide range of consistencies in a flexible, strong, sheet-form material for many uses. E.g. a veg-tanned skin with a raw streak left in the center makes waterproof, flexible, rot-resistant clothing, sheathing, bellows etc. Such leather was used in Scandinavia up until modern times.
Withes, or twisted lengths of wood, mostly hardwood saplings, are a subsistence living staple, creating strong, tough loops, hoops, collars, rope etc. Coiled baskets made from softwood roots were made tight enough to use for cooking in many societies. These were lightweight, tough utensils compared to ceramics.
And in ancient Greece they would ask a priest of the local temple to Hermes to put a blessing icon on a drafty door.
It would then be Hermetically sealed.
Chinese lacquer is a polymer made from the sap of a tree, and the Chinese have been using it for thousands of years:
Several answers have already been given – pitch, various plant saps.
But here’s one that’s still in common use, although largely replaced by plastics these days. I didn’t realize how widely used until recently.
It’s linseed oil. Especially “boiled” linseed oil (which isn’t really boiled – it’s a complicated story).
You’ve likely heard the story about rags wetted with linseed oil getting hotter and hotter until eventually it can burst into flame. What they don’t tell you is that it’s because of the Heat of Polymerization. They tal;k about linseed oil "drying’, but it it’s not really drying – it’s polymerizing into a natural plastic.
This is why they coated cloth with it to make waterproof oilcloth – I used to wonder about that name. Wouldn’t oiled cloth eventually lose the oil? Wouldn’t anything placed in an oilcloth bag , even if preserved from water, get wet with oil? No, because the linseed oil polymerizes around the cloth and forms a dry (eventually) watertight seal. Just like the way they later dipped raincloaks into rubber to make “Macadams”.
Mix linseed oil with chalk to give it some body and you have putty for setting your windows in place. At first it’s workable, but eventually it hardens. Nowadays they use different plastics, like RTV (Room Temperature Vulcanizing Rubber, actually, another plant derivative, when all is said and done) or another polymer.
Artists used to use (and often still do) use paints made from linseed oil. Again, the oil is basically the glue that keeps the pigment stuck to the canvas. It’s workable when fresh, but polymerizes as it dries after exposure to air (and isn’t concentrated enough to catch fire)Other paints use different “glues”, like casein long ago in milk-based paints, or modern acrylic paints.
Another possibility that struck me was when I once saw an 18th century silk condom, and wondered how something so full of holes could function effectively. I suppose that, properly used, it could reduce conception. But then I wondered if coating it with linseed oil to make a sort of miniature Macadam for your penis might not be the way it was used. Sure enough, I found after a little research that silk coated with linseed oil was used for lots of things. “Oiled Silk” was finer and thinner than Oilcloth. It was used in some cases for condoms, especially in China.
There are other possibilities. Before rubber became generally available, printers made their ink rollers out of “Composition”, a mixture of hide glue, molasses, and various tempering agents. (On an internet Board I learned that one home printer duplicated this by basically melting Gummy Bears and casting it into a cylinder – gelatin is close the hide glue, and the sugar acts like the molasses). The result is very rubber-like in texture, but deforms easily – you don’t leave a Composition roller sitting out resting on the rolling part, or it can get a “flat”. However, “Composition” seems to be a 19th century invention. I can’t find earlier references to it. In the 18th century printed daubed ink onto their presses with cloth-covered stuffed Inkballs.
You mean “Mackintosh”. Macadam is a type of road surfacing.
Why the raw streak in the center? Doesn’t seem like something I’d want in a garment.
I saw what you did there.
Through-tanned leather lets water pass through readily - too well even when curried to high heavens. If you want water-proof garments, you need to leave the center raw. Just ask the Norsk fishermen who used this stuff until industrial goods became commonplace.
I misread that as raw steak.
Mea culpa. My mental Rolodex got stuck, as Pepper Mill always says.
I think the word you’re looking for is layer, not streak. A streak would be those things on a skunk’s back; a layer would mean you have leather that’s completely tanned on both surfaces but untanned in between. A sandwich of tanned-untanned-tanned.
Oh, the pedantry! Alas, I’m only a professional trad tanner, in contact with a good percentage of Western colleagues in existence, and I’ve never used the word ‘layer’ in this context, nor heard it used. Streak, jargon or not, is in everyday use.
Let’s check Merriam Webster:
Definition of “streak”:
- a narrow layer (as of fat)
Urushiol, like, the stuff that causes a rash from poison ivy and poison oak? How interesting!