Ancient Textiles

Production, Crafts and Society

Marie-Louise Nosch, C. Gillis, C. Gillis

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781782974390
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Archeologia

An understanding of textiles and the role they played in the past is important for anyone interested in past societies. Textiles served and in fact still do as both functional and symbolic items. The evidence for ancient textiles in Europe is split quite definitely along a north-south divide, with an abundance of actual examples in the north, but precious little in the south, where indirect evidence comes from such things as vase painting and frescoes. This volume brings together these two schools to look in more detail at textiles in the ancient world, and is based on a conference held in Denmark and Sweden in March 2003. Section one, Production and Organisation takes a chronological look through more than four thousand years of history; from Syria in the mid-third millennium BC, to Seventeenth Century Germany. Section two, Crafts and Technology focuses on the relationship between the primary producer (the craftsman) and the secondary receiver (the archaeologist/conservator). The third section, Society, examines the symbolic nature of textiles, and their place within ancient societal groups. Throughout the book emphasis is placed on the universality of textiles, and the importance of information exchange between scholars from different disciplines. A small book on finds First Aid for the Excavation of Archaeological Textiles is included as an Appendix.

PART 1 INTRODUCTION TO TEXTILES: BACKGROUND, STUDIES AND APPLICATION

1 Methodological Introduction

by John Peter Wild

The development of research into the history and archaeology of the earliest Old World textiles, the tools required for their production and the craftworkers themselves, is briefly reviewed as a preamble to a survey of the character of the primary evidence available to us, and current approaches to its interpretation. Surviving archaeological textiles and implements, their analysis by methods scientific and traditional, and the light cast by ethnographic studies are considered. Iconography and the multifarious written sources also make an important contribution. The risks inherent in combining information from multiple sources without due care and attention are emphasised.

For much of the world 2003 was the Year of the Sheep, just the right time to celebrate the growing band of scholars devoted to the study of ancient textile practices. It was not always so. Those of us with long memories will not forget the sense of academic isolation when there were so few colleagues with whom to share new discoveries and ideas. The field of study was international from the beginning, simply because scholars were geographically so scattered. Personal contacts and the regular exchange of off-prints were vital. Today, however, we can feel much greater confidence, though it is still an uphill struggle to feed our results into the wider world of archaeology, Ancient and Medieval history, lexicography and cognate disciplines.

My contribution has been entitled ‘Methodological Introduction’, but it is certainly not my intention to teach grandmother to suck eggs. Instead, I want to review briefly the spectrum of evidence on which we can draw, highlighting on the way some of the special problems associated with it.

One of the principal dangers, as I see it, is an overly enthusiastic approach to combining evidence from two or more separate types of source in order to address a particular issue. I can only offer a personal view, and I apologise for that; but in quoting examples of difficulties and mistakes, it is more diplomatic to quote one’s own errors.

First, a few words about the Forschungs-geschichte of ancient textile studies. It is not a new subject, and there were some giants in the past.

I would hesitate to claim that the collectors of holy relics in the Middle Ages were the first textile archaeologists; for the much-travelled scrap of Roman silk damask, now in the shrine of the Three Kings in Köln, was valued for its association with the physical remains of a saint rather than as a textile-technical accomplishment.¹ Ordinary people, however, made real textile discoveries. In 1850 peat diggers in Yorkshire uncovered a fully-clothed body, ‘evidently a Roman ... the toga was of a green colour while some parts of the dress were of a scarlet hue; the stockings were of yellow cloth and the sandals were of a finely artistic shape.’² The body was reburied in a local churchyard, but the sandal and the shoe insole reached the Yorkshire Museum in York. Until recently the Roman attribution was dismissed;³ but the finders now have the last laugh. The hobnailed sandal has been identified as Roman, 2nd or early 3rd century AD, and that must be true of the insole, too. One can only mourn the loss of the rest of the costume.

Serious academic study of early textiles in Europe tended to be finds-driven as archaeology emerged from antiquarianism in the 19th century. In Denmark, for instance, in 1861 speedy intervention by a founding-father of archaeology, J.J.A.Worsaae, led to the systematic excavation and recording of Bronze Age oak coffins in the mound of Trindhøj (Ribe amt) and the wool clothing they contained.⁴ Peat digging in the Jutland peninsula brought to light some spectacular finds of wool garments ritually deposited in what were lakes of the Iron Age. A famous shirt from Thorsberg clearly fascinated the artist who painted it in 1861 for the National Museum in Copenhagen.⁵

By contrast, in Egypt there was so much surviving textile material that familiarity almost bred contempt. The great cache of clothing from the 18th-dynasty tomb of Kha at Thebes,⁶ however, was hard to ignore, as were the exotic garments from the tomb of T utankhamun.⁷

There were some valiant, contemporary attempts to assess these early textile finds, but it was some years before the true pioneers of textile archaeology emerged. It is notable how they were concerned, not just with analysis and recording, but with understanding their material in a wider context.

In the 19th century, sinking water-tables in the circumalpine lakes revealed the timbers of the Pfahlbauten (lake-side dwellings), and numerous scraps of cloth were recovered from them, now dated to between 4400 and 850 BC.⁸ Many entered the collection of the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum in Zürich, where Emil Vogt published a ground-breaking account of them in 1937.⁹ Fifteen years later, he turned his attention to the early medieval silks from reliquaries in the Valais, and his technical record of them has simply not been bettered.¹⁰ In Denmark, Margrethe Hald’s corpora of prehistoric clothing from northern bogs were illuminated by her fascination with the light that ethnographic parallels can throw upon finds and craft techniques.¹¹ Fascination with the living ethnographic tradition took Marta Hoffman in the fifties to Lappish Norway and to the rediscovery of how the warp-weighted loom was used.¹² For all three scholars, understanding the craftspeople behind the artefacts was a prime objective.

A few polymaths, like the industrial chemist Rodolpe Pfister, were as capable of tackling the technology of textiles, and in his case analysing dye-stuffs, as making sense of obscure ancient written sources.¹³ Pfister’s pioneering account of Graeco-Roman dyeing processes, written in 1935,¹⁴ is almost as great an achievement as his reports on textiles from Roman Syria.¹⁵

The wealth of references to textile manufacture in the classical writers attracted the attention of James Yates, whose Textrinum Antiquorum, published in 1843, assembles the relevant passages and offers comment on them from an ethnographic and historical viewpoint.¹⁶ His work was extensively quarried by later writers, not least R.J. Forbes for his 1956 survey of textile production in the series Studies in Ancient Technology. Forbes’ merit is to have brought together for the first time the archaeological and the written sources.¹⁷ His colleagues in Leiden also plied him with information from ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant.

There are heroes–but also villains. The sad tale of how so-called Coptic textiles were recovered from late Roman and early medieval graves in Egypt does not need to be repeated. But at least they were recovered. Papyrus-hunters, by contrast, focussed on the rubbish dumps associated with the Roman settlements. Where papyri survive, so should rags. But they were presumably jettisoned, as well as a wonderful opportunity to match text with textile.

With rather more optimism we can now turn to questions of source critique. Every archaeologist working in a trench knows the feeling of slight irritation when a casual visitor asks, ‘How did you know it was there?’ The same question could be asked about the ancient textile industry. ‘Archaeology’ is an instant answer, but it needs to be qualified. Tools and textile fragments are archaeological artefacts, but so are sculptures and wall-paintings, Linear B and cuneiform tablets and papyri. Each, however, requires a different code to unlock the information which it contains.

Extant textiles are an obvious starting point, but accident of survival leads to a biased record. Peat bogs offer a classic textile-friendly micro-environment, but not for processed vegetable fibres,¹⁸ and not if conditions are alkali, as they are at Illerup Ådal in Denmark.¹⁹ Deserts, too, are selective. Cloth fragments survive well in the tower-tombs of Palmyra, but not below ground level in the city.²⁰ Frustratingly, when textiles survive, we can usually afterwards identify the particular contributing circumstances; it is much harder to predict in advance when and where textiles can be expected on an excavation.²¹

The importance of mineralised textiles is easy to overlook, but Lise Bender Jørgensen has demonstrated how an entire textile landscape can be created from such uninspiring finds.²² Excavated sites with large, statistically meaningful groups of te...