Unraveling the Fabric of the Past: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Archaeological Textiles

This chapter reflects on the contribution of interdisciplinary approaches to studying archeological textiles and, in particular, highlights the more recent focus on the cultural dimensions of early textiles. The manufacture of textiles, like few other materials, requires both conceptual, abstract knowledge and practical or procedural know-how, and therefore includes both social context and technology. An understanding of technological developments in textile production in the past sometimes takes decades of research, new approaches, and working against assumptions that have been entrenched in scholarship. In draft spinning, retted and generally well-processed fibers are drawn out from a mass of fibers usually arranged on a distaff and twisted continuously using a rotating spindle. In splicing, strips of fibers are joined in individually, often after having been stripped from the plant stalk directly and without or with only minimal retting. The desirability of the traded goods was often determined by their raw material and/or its quality.