NO-ONE actually wonders what Venus de Milo was doing before she lost her arms, but she was a working woman, and her work was spinning. (One can tell this from the remaining musculature on her torso; her left arm was raised to hold the distaff with its load of fibres and her right hand was held low, pulling out the thread as the spindle twisted by her knees.)

For thousands of years making cloth was one of women's chief occupations and the looms and spindles they left behind are often the only concrete traces of a job shaping a thousand cultures.

Studying cloth making also unravels history better than brutish archaeology; Stone Age people (before 3000.BC), for example, are generally considered as living at subsistence level, simply working to survive. Yet the cloth that has endured is astonishingly ornate; one piece from a swamp near Zurich weaves triangles within a complicated three-level, three-colour pattern of checks.

It seems women had time to create beautiful crafts, and the cloth itself shows they enjoyed the task. Danish Bronze Age weft patterns (created when the bobbin, carrying thread, passes over and under the fixed warp threads) show that two or more women wove the cloth, handing the bobbins to each other across a wide loom. Even before the Neolithic age of domesticity fibre spinning was known to the nomad peoples of Europe, who have left behind them 17,000-year-old bits of string (at Lascaux, in the Dordogne). Spinning and even weaving can be done on the move, but once people started settling and domesticating animals cloth production began in earnest.

The selected breeding of domestic sheep around 4000.BC produced a nice woolly coat and as it is easy to dye this discovery in around 3000.BC launched the symbols and patterns that define nations (most flags created before 1856, when synthetic dyes appeared, are combinations of red and blue because these are the most fade-resistant natural dyes).

Elizabeth Wayland Barber, in her book Women's Work: the first 20,000 years, shows that cloth design and colour spin an unbroken thread through history. She has found that the costume of a Bronze Age woman, depicted on a figurine found in a cremation urn in Romania, is almost identical to the Bulgarian folk costume still seen today, 3500 years later, with the scoop neck to the bodice fringed with inverted hearts and the full skirt fronted with an elaborate embroidered apron and cinched with a coloured sash.

And the proof of just who was making the clothes comes from the fact that men of the Minoan civilisation in Crete wore simple loin-cloths while their women wore elaborately-decorated, bell-shaped skirts with open-fronted bodices. Wayland Barber also demonstrates the linguistic heritage handed to us by cloth making (twill, like tweed, comes from the word two and refers to a distinctive method of pattern weaving in which the threads are paired), and draws on classical literature to illustrate how cloth making operated at the heart of the world's ancient societies - putting right the male classics scholars.

Penelope's famous cloth, for example, which she wove and unwove nightly as Odysseus made his way back to her, is generally perceived as a winding sheet because we are told it was for her father-in-law's funeral. ``But she could have woven that in a couple of weeks and wouldn't have come close to fooling her suitors for three years,'' says Barber. She thinks it is a story cloth, familiar to Homer's audience, detailing scenes from history in the way of semi-literate cultures.

She also shows how cloth making was seen as the very heart of life itself. Women create cloth, like children, out of almost nothing; the Fates, indeed, are depicted as spinning, measuring out and cutting off the thread of one's life. And so it is entirely right that the Venus de Milo, goddess of love and procreation, should be spinning; it is, after all, a woman's work.

JANE SCOTT

n.Women's Work: the first 20,000 years, Elizabeth Wayland Barber (Norton, #9.95).