Correct identification of textile fibres is an important issue in archaeology because the use of different materials can yield crucial information about the society that produced the textiles. Textiles made of plant and animal fibres can normally be easily distinguished, but to distinguish between different types of plant fibres, in particular different types of bast fibres, is difficult. Some years back it was shown that the features fibre diameter, lumen diameter, dislocation (nodes), and cross markings cannot be used on their own to distinguish between the typical bast fibres used for textiles in ancient Europe: flax, hemp, and nettle. Particularly not when only a few fibres are available for an examination so that statistical analysis is not possible, as is often the case in archaeology. The last two characterization features typically used to distinguish between bast fibres are cross‐section shape and lumen shape. In this paper, we present a study of retted and unretted fibres (in the stem) of flax, nettle, and hemp, and show that also cross‐section shape and lumen shape cannot be used as distinguishing features on their own.

中文翻译：

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横截面形状是植物纤维鉴定中的独特特征吗？

正确识别纺织纤维是考古学中的一个重要问题，因为使用不同的材料可以产生有关生产纺织品的社会的重要信息。通常可以容易地区分由植物和动物纤维制成的纺织品，但是很难区分不同类型的植物纤维，特别是不同类型的韧皮纤维。几年前的研究表明，纤维直径，管腔直径，位错（节点）和十字标记这些特征不能单独用来区分古代欧洲用于纺织品的典型韧皮纤维：亚麻，大麻和荨麻。特别是当只有少数几根纤维可用于检查时，不可能进行统计分析，这在考古学中经常是这样。通常用于区分韧皮纤维的最后两个特征是横截面形状和管腔形状。在本文中，我们对亚麻，荨麻和大麻的脱纤和未脱纤纤维（茎中）进行了研究，并表明横截面形状和管腔形状也不能单独用作区分特征。