Ornament of Neolithic settlements of Ukraine
Comparing the Paleolithic bone objects decorated with this ornament with the Neolithic “seals”, he concludes that such stamps were made to tattoo a woman’s body during ritual acts, and that it is the custom of tattooing that is the connecting link that fills the Mesolithic gap between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. But along with the preservation of the ancient ornament in the form of mandatory ritual coloring in the Mesolithic, it can also be assumed that in the Neolithic period the seals were no longer used for tattooing or not only for it, but at some stage they began to apply carpet-meander patterns on fabrics made of plant fibers, which probably already existed in the Neolithic life, as evidenced by the finds of spinning wheels.
With the development of weaving techniques, the ancient craftswomen of the Neolithic or Eneolithic were able to transfer complex ornaments from rhombuses and meanders directly into the structure of the fabric. Such an ancient carpet-type ornament, almost identical to the Mezin and Early Neolithic, can be easily found on linen canvases that existed in North Russian villages at the beginning of the 20th century. Made in a multi-thread technique, they are all completely covered with a rhombo-meander pattern, obtained with a complex interweaving of warp and weft threads. As a rule, towels, tablecloths, skirts were made of such canvas, to which strips of spacers were sewn, recruited with red threads along a white field. The ornament of these spacers is often very similar to the ancient rhombo-meander, but while the texture of the white canvas repeats the ancient compositions with practically no changes, on the spacers we see, as it were, fragments of an archaic scheme, its parts divided and grouped according to some new principles.
North Russian weaving