Overview
The Archaic covers thousands of years across a continent of radically different climates, so there is no single Archaic dress. What the period does show is the beginning of regional specialisation: as the post-glacial environments settled, communities dressed for the country they were in, and the differences between the Arctic, the eastern woodlands, the desert West and the Northwest Coast start to be visible in what survives.
Key garments and style
Tanned hide and fur remained the staple for most of the continent, worked with bone awls and needles that are among the commonest finds. The genuine innovation is fibre. In the dry caves of the Great Basin and the Southwest, sandals plaited from sagebrush bark and yucca survive in numbers — the Fort Rock sandals from Oregon are among the oldest footwear known anywhere — along with twined bags, mats and nets. Cordage and basketry technology developed here long before pottery or agriculture.
Ornament is the other visible marker: shell traded far inland, native copper hammered cold in the Great Lakes region, stone and bone beads. The distances that shell and copper travelled show that these were valued goods moving through exchange networks, not merely what lay to hand.
A caution runs through all of it. Organic material survives only where it is very dry, very wet or very cold, so the record is heavily biased toward a few regions, and the absence of clothing evidence elsewhere is a fact about preservation rather than about dress.
Transition
In the Formative period, cotton cultivation and weaving in Mesoamerica and the Southwest turned this fibre skill into woven clothing, and the loom arrives.