Textile Records

Functional Analysis, Interpretation and Recording of Textile-Related Artefacts in the Mediterranean and Beyond

Alina Iancu, Alina Iancu, Kalliope Sarri, Kalliope Sarri

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9798888572146
• Subtopic: Fashion Design
• Index: Social Sciences

Examines prehistoric and ancient textiles, their archaeological evidence, and proposes improved methods for recording and publishing findings.

Since early prehistoric times, textiles have been essential to human life, providing protection, enabling social display, furnishing homes, supporting transportation and warfare, and fulfilling countless other needs. Although textiles rarely survive except under exceptional environmental conditions, a growing body of archaeological evidence bears witness to their fundamental importance and to the sophisticated crafts that produced them. Fragmentary fabrics, mineralised textiles on metal objects, carbonised fibres and textile imprints offer valuable data on raw materials, techniques and textile quality in the past. Equally important, the rich array of tools recovered from archaeological contexts reveals the techniques used by prehistoric and ancient craftspeople to transform fibres into finished products.

Despite their central role in past societies, textiles and textile-related artefacts remain significantly underrepresented in archaeological literature compared to other categories of finds. Long regarded as a modest domestic craft primarily associated with women, they have suffered from gender bias, general scholarly neglect and limited specialist knowledge. As a result, their publication has often been inconsistent, prone to confusion and subject to misinterpretation.

Recent advances in archaeological textile studies now provide a strong foundation for reassessing earlier research and for developing more rigorous and systematic approaches to the recording, analysis and publication of these artefacts. This volume brings together archaeologists and textile specialists to examine the history of textile recording in archaeology and to propose new methodologies for integrating textile finds into mainstream archaeological publications with the same scholarly rigour and public accessibility granted to other categories of material culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Part 1 - Textiles in context
• Chapter 1 - Unravelling the record: towards standardised approaches to the identification, interpretation and documentation of some of the less known prehistoric and ancient textile implements
• Chapter 2 - Loom weights in context: examples of textile tool documentation in the history of Aegean Bronze Age research
• Chapter 3 - The necropolis of the Wielbark culture in Wilkowo (1st–3rd century AD) as an example of successful collaboration between field archaeologists, conservators and textile archaeologists
• Part 2 - Spinning and weaving
• Chapter 4 - Roman spinning tools: a history of misunderstanding
• Chapter 5 - Anything but a distaff: the misidentification of textile tools in the north-eastern Roman provinces
• Chapter 6 - Amber and jet in the textile sphere of Roman Hispania: import, circulation, function and identity
• Chapter 7 - From text to loom: rethinking complementary weaving tools – the Greek kerkís and the Latin radius in focus
• Chapter 8 - Loom weights through the ages: an overview
• Chapter 9 - Reassessing clay spools: an overview of spools in ancient Greece and beyond
• Chapter 10 - Lead spindle whorls and loom weights in the Aegean and Pontus, 1st millennium BC: remarks on functionality, production and use
• Chapter 11 - Making textile tools from scratch: a methodological framework for documentation and interpretation of textile tools and weaving structures from recycled materials in archaeology
• Chapter 12 - Integrating tablet-weaving evidence into general archaeology: tools, fragments and methodologies
• Part 3 - Other tools and tool containers
• Chapter 13 - Grey areas in the identification and recording of textile tools: some enigmatic cases from Aegean prehistory
• Chapter 14 - Toolbox for specialised textile work: the enigmatic chest model from The tomb of the Rich Athenian Lady (850 BC), Athens
• Part 4 - Interdisciplinary methods of tools research
• Chapter 15 - Recording use-wear traces on textile tools with Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI): a case study from archaic Messapia
• Appendix: the Textile Tools Record Sheet: aiming for a standardised documentation of ancient textile tools in general archaeology