It is relatively easy to collect fresh resin from live plants but a totally different story when the flowers are dry and broken up to harvest seeds. The process necessary to separate chaff/trims from the resin glands and to collect the separated trichomes is totally dependent on some customized basketry and a tightly woven fiber receptacle to catch and contain the falling resin.

Let’s take a little historical perspective on the art of weaving basketry and textiles.

Weaving is the oldest human craft with tool making and was perfected early in our evolution so that the main characteristics of basketry are the same today as they were before 3,000 BC[1]; the origin is simply the rudimentary lacing of two flexible branches or fiber together[2].

The varieties of basketry creations are adapted to their use, from rough gathering vessel to perfectly waterproofed container used for cooking.

The oldest known baskets have been found in Egypt and have been carbon dated to be between 10,000 and 12,000 years old; 7,000 years old baskets have also been discovered in Central Asia[iii].

The concept of weaving fiber involved in basketry is also used to make rough textiles or floor covering; the creation of textile has evolved from basketry techniques[iv].

The oldest evidences of textiles were found in clay fragments dating to around 30,000 BC with clear impressions of a finely woven textile similar to linen[v].

Cotton was one of the first domesticated plants around 7,000 years ago in what is now Pakistan and Northern India[vi].

Silk was first developed in China, possibly as early as 6,000 BC and definitely before 3,000 BC.

The origins of carpets remain a mystery but woven floor covering were in use before 7,000 BC by nomadic tribes in Central Asia.

Solid evidences show that we had not only the means to collect dry resin ten of thousands of years ago but that the three potential birth places of Cannabis are also the birthplace of agriculture and of most textile production.

There is no archeological evidence or reference of sieving Cannabis resin or Hashish until the 9^th century and the apogee of the Muslim empire; however, solid evidence of various sieving procedures going far back in time abound.

The earliest direct evidences of humans processing pre-domesticated wild grains, seeds and cereals have been found in Mozambique, Africa. They are over 100,000 years old[i].

Traces of starch grains on grinding stones recovered from archaeological sites in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic are solid evidence that our ancestors were grinding flour and roots at least 30,000 years ago, which could not be consumed without some sort of sieving.

Archeological evidence of plant samples, classified as “finely sieved by-products” by modern scientists, have been found in Jetum, Central Asia and dated to 6,000 BC[ii].

Despite so many archeological validations of diverse types of sieving, Cannabis historian Michael Aldrich believes that the first sieved Hashish may not have been produced until the 17^th century, after the introduction of tobacco from the New World.

Robert C Clarke describes the two oldest known forms of resin collection in his book “Hashish”, however these methods cannot be considered as true sieving techniques.

The first is simple; let the plants dry indoors in a windless room, raised over a clean woven material, the drying resin heads will fall at the slightest touch.

The second technique is called “carpet collection”. Cannabis plants are threshed over a tightly woven carpet. When all parts of the plants have been thoroughly broken up, the debris is moved back and forth lightly by hand to dislodge all the resin before being brushed out. The fine resin powder collects between the closely knotted fibers of the carpet and is then gathered by turning the carpet over and gently beating the resin out. The carpet collection method is a little more advanced but very awkward. It is also remarkable that the birth and evolution of woven flooring from rough woven fiber to tightly knotted wool carpet would not have offered our ancestors many clues and opportunities to a more efficient sieving process.

These collecting techniques do not offer a logical evolution when you think that we have been processing plants, including Cannabis, for their seeds and grains for hundred of thousands of years. The oldest form of a tool adapted to the separation of seeds and grains from chaff is a wide, elongated and loosely woven fiber container that is still in use in all tribal cultures around the planet.

It is a device, which lets a large amount of the finest threshed or grounded material fall through; most certainly the actual ancestor of all sieves.

There is no archeological evidence of a logical co-evolution with any other type of sieving technique or sieving material developed by humanity, which makes the origins and evolution of sieving Cannabis resin a complete mystery.

The oldest resin collection technique is Charas but, while offering a unique live resin concentrate, hand rubbing is wasteful, the process is time consuming and the harvesting window is small and seasonal which would be reason enough for an improvement of the collecting process.

Our ancestors would have experienced dry resin at an early stage of their contact with the Cannabis plant simply because seeds and fiber are always collected when plants are dry.

Dry resin sticks on hands when breaking up flowers to harvest seeds but a lot is lost and the birth of dry sieving most certainly came from simply salvaging as much of the resin as possible, which is logical if you know its psychoactive and medicinal properties.

Sieved Cannabis resin and Hashish manufacturing may have been kept secret for millenniums simply because of religious beliefs and/or trade advantages.

The religious and commercial correlation around the use of Cannabis resin cannot be ignored and can logically be related to the birth of incense as well, which has been burned for sacred and healing purposes since the rise of humanity. The realization that scents produced by burning materials could heighten the senses and alter perceptions must have come early in our quest to control fire; the smell of aromatic woods, herbs and leaves can offer rare sensory pleasures. A gradual development of specific recipes has ensued from those early olfactory experiences and been passed down from generation to generation to become what is known today as aromatherapy.

Many types of incense were more valuable than gold or silver and their origins and recipes were well kept secrets[i].

Pressed Cannabis resin was most certainly first burned as incense, its value would have been high, the “formula” and its origins worthy of total secrecy.

The oldest myths concerning Hashish come from the Persian and Arab world around 1100 AD. The legends of Hasan ibn al-Sabbah, the “Old Man of the Mountain” who terrorized the civilized world with his infamous sect of assassins[ii] and of the Sufi master Sheik Haidar who (re) discovered Charas/Hashish or Cannabis[iii] are some of the earliest written accounts of the assumed use and the intoxicating powers of Hashish[iv], interestingly enough there are earlier Muslim medical texts debating the pros and cons of eating Hashish.

The great ninth-century Islamic physician Rhazes[v] prescribed Hashish and his contemporary, the Arab physician Ibn Wahshiyah[vi], warned of the potential lethal effects of it, which he labeled a poison.

Some of the earliest references on Hashish are found in One Thousand and One

Nights[vii], also known as The Arabian Nights, the thousand year old Arabic manuscript, and in the Zahr al-‘arish fi tahrim al-Hashish, the oldest monograph on Hashish, written in the 13th Century but since lost.

Hashish is the substance of legends, the source of numerous myths from diverse cultures born from millennium of secrecy; its origins may sadly be forever lost to us.
The birthplace of sieving and Hashish is more easily determined but remains an educated guess nonetheless; it is most certainly the Hindu Kush Mountain range, one of the potential birthplace of Cannabis, oldest center of plant domestication and repository of the most ancient Hashish traditions.

Traditional sieving techniques from Afghanistan, Lebanon and Morocco will be the subject of the third part of “Origins of Concentrate”.

Written by Frenchy Cannoli

Published in Weed World magazine issue114

[1]                Origin of Concentrate, Part 1, Weed World Issue113, Oct./Nov. 2014

[2]                Encyclopedia Britannica

[3]                Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Age by E. J. W. Barber

[4]                Wikipedia

[5]                Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Age by E. J. W. Barber

[6]                Dolní Věstonice is a small village in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. It is
known for a series of ice age archaeological sites in the area. These sites were used by mammoth hunters, and finds include a triple burial, the earliest evidence of weaving from impressions of textiles and basketry and nets on little pieces of hard clay, dating from 27,000 years ago as well as the Venus of Dolní Věstonice.

[7]
http://archaeology.about.com/od/cterms/a/Cotton.htm

[8]
Stone age pantry: Archaeologist unearths earliest evidence of modern humans using wild grains and tubers for food, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091217141312.htm

[9]
Jetum is considered the earliest farming economy in Central Asia
Origins of Agriculture in Western Central Asia: An Environmental Archeological Study
By David R. Harris

[10]
A Brief History of Incense by Margaret McGoverne

[11]
http://ismaili.net/heritage/book/export/html/17928

^[12]
Hashish in Islam 9th to 18th Century, Gabriel G. Nahas, M.D. Department of Anesthesiology, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons New York, New York

^[13]
Hashish in Islam 9th to 18th Century, Gabriel G. Nahas, M.D. Department of Anesthesiology, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons New York, New York

^[14]
Mohammad-e Zakariā-ye Rāzi, (854 CE – 925 CE), was a Persian polymath, physician, alchemist and chemist, philosopher and important figure in the history of medicine.
He has been described as the father of pediatrics, and a pioneer of ophthalmology.

Some volumes of his work Al-Mansuri, namely “On Surgery” and “A General Book on Therapy”, became part of the medical curriculum in Western universities. He is considered as “probably the greatest and most original of all the physicians, and one of the most prolific as an author.

^[15]
Ibn Wahshiyya (9th/10th centuries) was an Iraqi alchemist, agriculturalist, farm toxicologist, Egyptologist and historian born in Iraq. He was one of the first historians to be able to at least partly decipher what was written in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. He wrote a toxicology treatise Book of Poisons, combining contemporary science, magic and astrology.
Medieval Arabic Toxicology: The Book on Poisons of Ibn Wahshtya and Its Relation to Early Indian and Greek Texts By Martin Levey, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Ser., Vol. 56, No. 7. (1966), pp. 1-130.” Text can be downloaded via — http://links.jstor.org/

[16]
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, First English edition 1706. See The Tale of the Hashish Eater in The Tale of the King “Umar ibn al-Nu’mân”, The Tale of the Qâdî and the Bhang-eater and the Bhang-eater and His Wife.