Contextualising Textile Production in Italy in the 1st Millennium BC

Compared to Central and Northern Europe, textile research Italy has been a rather neglected field until recently. The reason most often cited for the absence of studies on ancient textiles in Italy is their extremely poor preservation. Textiles, however, are much more common finds than generally thought and survive in original organic state but also as carbonised and mineralised traces, as well as in the form of imprints. In addition, there are numerous other sources of evidence, such as textile tools, palaeobotanical and archaeozoological remains, as well as iconographic and written sources, which permit us to gain valuable information about many and varied aspects of textile production in ancient Italy. The scientific methods have been or are being developed within archaeology that can be applied to gain new knowledge about ancient textiles on unprecedented scale. Finally, experimental archaeology is of great service in elucidating important technological questions. The aim of this special volume is to demonstrate the potential of archaeological textiles and related sources for the investigation of ancient Italian economy, technology and agriculture and to discuss new methods that can be applied to the investigation of ancient textiles.