Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Elizabeth Wayland Barber is an American author and expert on textiles, as well as Professor emerita of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College.

Wayland Barber earned a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College in archaeology in 1963, and she earned her PhD from Yale University in linguistics in 1968.

Her books include Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean (1992), Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years; Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (1995), The Mummies of Ürümchi (1999), When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth (2004, coauthor with Paul T. Barber) and The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance (2013).

Among other things, she has proposed that if 19th-century scientists had thought to name prehistorical periods with an eye on women’s work and the things they invented, instead of focusing their naming only on men’s more durable inventions (Iron Age, Bronze Age, etc.), that they might have acknowledged women's invention of string as what she has named “The String Revolution.”

In addition to her academic work, as of 2009 she has directed and choreographed for her own folk and historical dance troupe for 38 years.

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