Session: #441

Content:

Textile archaeology has in recent years provided new tools for investigating interactions, networks, and mobility in ancient societies. This session invites contributions that consider how the study of tools, raw materials, and techniques for textile production can reveal the movement of people, the circulation of goods, and the exchange of technologies, and ideas in the Mediterranean area.
Textiles are excellent exchange goods, being durable, portable, and highly valuable (both as utilitarian and ‘luxury’ objects). Textile makers also moved across the ancient Mediterranean. Written sources from the Bronze Age onwards document both free and forced mobility of textile workers. Mobility took different forms, such as individuals marrying into another community, families or larger groups moving together to settle somewhere new willingly or as slaves, captives, or refugees fleeing war, environmental crisis, or economic hardship. In the absence of written sources, we cannot be certain how people moved, but archaeological data enable us to analyse the direction, scale, timing, and consequences of mobility.
Tools for weaving and spinning are especially suitable for tracing and analysing networks of movement at a regional scale. In the last 10 years archaeologists have made considerable progress in the study and publication of textile tools and remains of textiles from individual sites. Now the time is ripe to connect the dots and consider these finds in a regional perspective.
We invite papers that chart how specific types of tools, techniques, raw materials, and goods moved within and across regions around the ancient Mediterranean. We strongly encourage synthetic and comparative perspectives, for example establishing regional typologies of tools, tracing the chronology and spread of specific shapes and techniques, and investigating the human activities that underpin distribution maps.

Session: #441

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