Tools, Textiles and Contexts : Investigating Textile Production in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age

Textile production in Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age societies emerges through interdisciplinary analyses of tools, contexts, and experimental archaeology revealing diverse fibers, techniques, sites, and the social and economic significance for practitioners and communities.

Textile production is one of the most important crafts in Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age societies and recent interdisciplinary and collaborative work offers crucial new perspectives into this field. The new and updated catalogue of archaeological textile finds presented here clearly demonstrates, even from the few extant finds, that knowledge of the use of fibers and of elaborate textile techniques that were used to produce textiles of different qualities was well developed.

The functional analysis of spindle whorls and loom weights can be explored through experimental archaeology employing newly developed methodologies. The results bring new insights into the types of textile that may potentially have been made by such tools. This is highly pertinent as textile tools often constitute the single most important and plentiful type of evidence for the various stages of textile production in the archaeological record.

The combination of experimental archaeology, analyses of textile tools and find contexts allows for a discussion of the nature of textile production at different sites, regions and time periods. A collaboration between archaeologists specialized in their site and textile tool specialists has produced data sets of a large number of textile tools from several Bronze Age settlements, including Khania, Malia, Midea, Tiryns, Troia and Tel Kabri. The results of these analyses provide unique insights into both the production processes and, significantly, into the range of types of textiles that could have been produced at specific sites. These results illustrate the central, social and economic impact of textile production in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age societies.

Table of Contents

Introduction



Chapter 1
1.1 Research history of textile tools (L. Rahmstorf)
1.2 The research history of experimental work on textile production (L. Olofsson)

Chapter 2
The basics of textile tools and textile technology - from fibre to fabric (E. Andersson Strand)

Chapter 3
Survey of Archaeological Textile Remains from the Eastern Mediterranean Area (S. Möller-Wiering, I. Skals)

Chapter 4
4.1 Experimental testing of Bronze Age textile tools (E. Andersson Strand, L. Olofsson, M.-L. Nosch)
4.2 Examination of spinning and weaving samples (S. Möller-Wiering)
4.3 Test of loom weights and 2/2 twill weaving (L. Olofsson and M.L. Nosch)
4.4 Weaving with Crescent Shaped Loom Weights. An investigation of a special kind of loom weight (A. Wisti Lassen)
4.5 From tools to textiles, concluding remarks (E. Andersson Strand)

Chapter 5
5.1 Introduction to the CTR database (E. Andersson Strand & M.L. Nosch)
5.2 Mathematical Analysis of the Spindle Whorl and Loom Weight data in the CTR Database (R. Firth)

Chapter 6
6.1 Textile Tools and Textile Production – Studies of Selected Bronze Age Sites
Introduction (E. Andersson Strand, M.-L. Nosch and J. Cutler)
6.2 Anatolia:
6.2.1 Textile tools from Troia (Marta Guzowska, Ralf Becks, Eva Andersson Strand, Joanne Cutler & Marie-Louise Nosch)
6.3 Cyprus:
6.3.1 Textile tools from Apliki, Cyprus (Joanna Smith, Joanne Cutler, Eva Andersson Strand, & Marie-Louise Nosch)
6.3.2 Textile tools from Kition, Cyrprus (Joanna Smith, Joanne Cutler, Eva Andersson Strand, & Marie-Louise Nosch)
6.4 Greece:
6.4.1 Textile tools from Akrotiri, Thera, Greece (Iris Tzachili, Stella Spantidaki, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.4.2 Textile tools from Archontiko, Greece (Evi Papadopoulou, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.4.3 Textile tools from Ayia Triada, Greece (Pietro Militello, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.4.4 Textile tools from Khania, Crete (Birgitta Pålsson Hallager, Erik Hallager, Maria Vlasaki, Maria Bruun, Yannis Tzedakis, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.4.5 Textile Tools from Quartier Mu, Malia, Crete (Jean-Claude Poursat, Françoise Rougemont, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.4.6 Textile Tools from Midea, Greece (Katie Demakopoulou, Yannis Fappas, Ann-Louise Schallin, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.4.7 Textile Production at Mycenae (Iphiyenia Tournavitou, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.4.8 Textile Tools from Phaistos, Greece (Pietro Militello, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.4.9 Textile Tools from Sitagroi (Ernestine S. Elster, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.4.10 Textile Tools from Thebes, Greece (Maria Emanuela Alberti, Vassilis Aravantinos, Ioannis Fappas, Athina Papadaki, Françoise Rougemont, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.4.11 Textile tools from Tiryns (Lorenz Rahmstorf, Malgorzata Siennicka, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)
6.5 Syro-Palestine:
6.5.1 Textile Tools from Tel Kabri, Israel (Asaf Yasur-Lankan, Nurith Goshen, Eva Andersson Strand, Marie-Louise Nosch & Joanne Cutler)

Eva Andersson Strand is Associate Professor at the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen.

Marie-Louise Nosch is Director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Textile Research, University of Copenhagen and Research Professor at the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen. She is the editor of many titles in the Ancient Textiles series.