READING PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26.

BORN TO TRADE

Long before our ancestors had any trappings of citation, they had a taste or material goods. Kate Douglas discovers where this ancient obsession has led us.

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Humans are born to trade and we don't need shops or money to do it - the heart of commerce is an instinctive ability for what anthropologists call reciprocity. This is an ability to exchange goods of equal worth and it evolved as the brains of our ancient ancestors and societies became more complex, allowing individuals to keep a running tally their interactions with others. Evidence from modem hunter-gatherers leaves little doubt that the exchange of food and flavors is innate, as is the ability to keep track of the credits and debits that accrue as a result. Combine this skill for mental book-keeping with even the most basic material culture, and trade inevitably follows.

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Once trade gets off the ground, the economic benefits quickly make it irresistible. But exchanging tools, food and other essentials of life in a barter economy is a far cry from the shopping mall. Modern consumerism sway beyond subsistence and utilitarianism to encompass everything from Gucci handbags and BMW convertibles to valuable paintings dearly, the worth of such goods is not inherent but resides in certain intangible qualities that we invest in them. When did humans start holding these goods in such high esteem?

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All the archaeological evidence for the flowering of consumer culture has up to now pointed to a date of around 40,000 years ago. That's when early modern humans started making increasingly intricate bone and stone tools, carving patterns into rocks and creating representational art such as carved figurines, jewellery and cave painting. However, discoveries in Africa are pushing the origins of consumerism much further back into human prehistory. A few years ago, reports began to emerge of discoveries made at the Blombos cave, a site of ancient human habitation in South Africa. Christopher Henshilwood and colleagues from the University of Bergen in Norway dated thousands of pieces of ochre from the cave and many of them proved to be more than 100,000 years old - before the time that early humans moved out of Africa. Ochre, a coloured clay that comes in various shades from red to black, does not occur naturally around Blombos and must have been imported from quarries at least 30 kilometres away, either directly by Blombos residents or through trade. Although ochre can be used to dry and preserve animal hides, the researchers are convinced the Blombos ochre had a symbolic purpose. For a start, it is predominantly red - any of the other colours available would have done for curing - and the surfaces of the clay had been scraped in a way that indicates they were used to yield pigment for dyes.

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An even more intriguing discovery from Blombos was of 41 beads dating from 76,000 years ago, found in clusters and made from the shells of a tiny mollusc. These cannot be natural deposits, argue the researchers, as each cluster contains shells of a similar size and colour with consistently placed holes. What's more, all the beads display a pattern of wear suggesting friction from rubbing against thread, clothes or other beads. The previous oldest find of beads in Africa dates back to just 45,000 years ago. And it seems the Blombos people’s taste for beautiful items was not an isolated phenomenon. Jessica Thompson of Arizona State University in Tempe has described finding shell fragments from a site in Tanzania that she believes may represent debris from bead manufacture. They are at least 45,000 and possibly 280,000 years old. Although there is no evidence of how the ancient beads were used, their modern counterparts are often traded. So it looks as though our taste for jewellery and art is much older than we thought.

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But why did we come to value these objects in the first place? In many animal species, individuals signal their genetic fitness by showing off with attention-grabbing adornment. Some researchers think that in humans, consumer products play a similar role. Archaeologist Aimee Plourde, from the University of California, also argues that even in egalitarian societies, some people are more successful than others. Among our ancestors, superior skills in areas such as hunting, crafts, environmental knowledge and contact with neighbouring groups would have brought respect - in other words, prestige. And because prestige brings social benefits, people would want to show off their talents. The best way to do this would be through demonstrating possession of material items that are hard to fake. ‘A good hunter, for instance, could advertise his skills by wearing the tooth of an animal that is elusive or dangerous,’ says Plourde. The benefits of prestige would also lead to competition to acquire it. As a result, the value and variety of prestige goods would spiral and there would be a parallel increase in the ranking of social systems. If Plourde is correct, prestige goods form a direct link between our innate drive for trade and the development of structured, hierarchical societies. They are arguably the first step on the road to modern civilisation, paving the way for agriculture and urbanisation. We may not be impressed by beads any more, but their modern equivalents have the same fascination. Nobody believes the guy who spends €670,000 on a Bugatti Veyron car does so because he needs to travel at 250mph. We all know in today’s consumer society he's buying an exclusive status symbol.

READING PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40.

NEW ZEALAND HOME TEXTILE CRAFTS OF THE 1930S TO 1950S

Objects made by previous generations of women should be valued more highly.

Domestic crafts do not build monuments to their makers, nor do they create wealth, and too often they have not survived. In consequence, the domestic crafts produced by mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers in New Zealand are often overlooked. But needlework should be preserved, for it helps to convey a sense of people’s identity and past beliefs in these remote island in the Pacific Ocean.

Women of previous generations expected to sew; they had to dress their families in an item when few people could afford to buy what they were capable of making. For some women this work may have been unwelcome drudgery, but for others it was an opportunity to explore their identities, beliefs and dreams with the only means readily at hand-a needle, some thread, and a piece of fabric.

Textiles are frustrating to collect. They are fragile; they stain; they develop rust marks; they fray and rot. If they are used, they deteriorate; yet if they are merely stored, the owner does not fully enjoy the pleasure of possession. That is probably why they have not been a popular thing to collect compared, for example, to antique furniture or fine China, which are more durable investments. It is also true that domestic crafts are seldom signed. We like signatures because we can more readily assign value - and high prices - if we can identify the marker. But most women at this time would never have considered signing their work. They were not expecting it to be seen outside their homes, where the creator’s identity was never in doubt. And they probably did not even expect it to last very long.

It does not help that such work falls into the category of crafts either, rather than fine arts, because crafts are looked on too often as a poor cousin to true creativity. Worse, they are made in a domestic context, so do not belong in the consciously elevated tradition of craft objects which compete with the arts, such as furniture. If things are made to be useful, especially only within the home and by ordinary housewives, we seem to have agreed they cannot be art. Why not?

It might be argued that the collector of textiles is a little like an archaeologist. Archaeology is a combination of history and detective work, and it involves treasure that is often beautiful. Likewise, digging for the past is what textile collectors do in junk shops, and the objects they find are a way of understanding the past through physical evidence.

The domestic crafts of this period, the 1930-1950, cannot be separated from the women’s magazines that were so popular at the time. The primary purpose of these publications was to allow women to glimpse how more prosperous people lived, by showing them photographs of the interiors of their houses. In these days before television, magazines provided realistic and achievable inducements to social betterment. I parallel to this, women were provided with much more down-to-earth and useful means of improving their homes in the form of printed patterns, which were readily available from fabric shops at low cost from the 1920s and 1930s onwards. Mostly, such patterns were for everyday items that fulfilled some domestic often keep offcuts from their purpose - aprons, tea cosies, curtains, bed-spreads, chair covers and the like. With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to distinguish this regulated tradition of needlework, governed by printed patterns, from the more individual work that women dreamed up themselves and whose form and execution were reflections of their own ideal and imagination. Although both schools have their merits, it is surely the latter tradition that will provide the collector with the greatest enjoyment. Most intriguing of all is work which suggests serendipity, even a certain element of chance, the piece having taken on a life of its own, determined perhaps by what resources were available at the time and the skill levels of the items maker. When it comes to needlework, flaws can be enjoyable, even failure may bring pleasure, and in this respect needlework can be contrasted with other art forms, where successful completion is paramount.

Some people collect out of a sense of nostalgia, a desire to evoke a comforting time that seems gentler than the present. But nostalgia should not always be trusted as it can be a sanitised form of history that blots out harsh reality. However, if a certain degree of nostalgia can be felt for the fabrics of the past, it is because they remind us of the care and attention with which women selected them. The texture of certain abstract patterned fabrics from the 1950s has the power to transport us all back to the dress and fabric shops of that time where women agonised over which choices to make, though they probably loved every minute of it. Old patchwork quilts in particular are evocative, because they represent an unknown family’s compressed history: pyjamas ball gowns, smart summer frocks, school dresses, all thrown together, a jumble of decorative traditions, past ceremonies and dreams. Women of the past would often keep offcuts their dressmaking and use them for patchwork, as a means of recording their family’s story for others to appreciate.

These may sound like nostalgic thoughts, but we should also remember how hard women’s lives were, that family life was not always idyllic, and that having no money was no fun. Such fabrics, then, should be seen as a wish for ideals and imaginations, although both something better, a way of daydreaming about a life that would turn out well in the end.