Interweaving traditions: clothing and textiles in Bronze Age and Iron Age Iberia

Abstract

In the past few years the field of archaeological textile research has witnessed a major dynamism as demonstrated by numerous conferences and publications on the topic, as well as establishment of large-scale interdisciplinary collaborative programmes. New scientific methods have been or are being developed within archaeology to gain new knowledge about ancient textiles on unprecedented scale. Compared to Central and Northern Europe, textile research in Spain and Portugal has been a rather neglected field until recently. The reason most often cited for the absence of studies on ancient textiles in both countries 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, palaebotanic 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 Iberia. This interdisciplinary volume gathers specialists in different fields in order to bring together and to discuss the various methods and approaches to textile and fibre studies in ancient Iberia and the Balearic Islands with a particular focus on the 1st millennium BCE. This journal issue is divided into four different sections dealing with sources of information for the study of textiles, raw materials, textile production and economy, and textiles and rituality. It includes an introduction to the volume in the beginning, and a discussion of the state of the art in textile analysis at the end. The overall aim of this volume is to demonstrate the potential of archaeological textiles for the investigation of prehistoric Iberian subsistence, technology and economy; as well as to introduce and discuss new methods that can be applied to the investigation of prehistoric textiles.