Working Group 1 – Textile Technologies

Objectives in WG1: to explore the origins and long-term development of textile technologies by examining tools and textiles and testing techniques using experimental archaeology and learning from craftspeople and textile engineers; to investigate how textile techniques influenced and were influenced by other fields of knowledge and cross-craft phenomena; to highlight the roles of skill and creativity, and the mechanisms for the diffusion of techniques, innovations, patterns and fashions, and how it has influenced other technologies and inventions.

Themes: Early textile craft and technology can be studied through a variety of sources: archaeological textile remains, textile imprints, tools, texts, images, but due to soil and climate conditions, very few textile remains are found in excavations and textile tools made of perishable materials such as wood have also not often survived. However, bone needles, spindle-whorls and loom-weights are numerous in excavated areas. The analysis of these tools, linked to the study of the few textile remains and textile imprints in clay, shed new light on the spinning, braiding and weaving methods of the past. Textile fibre crops and the later exploitation of wool were innovations that affected textile technology profoundly. Wool has played an important role in technical innovations since the Bronze Age when dyes and mordents became a specialised field of knowledge. The individual sections of the chaîne opératoire are highly gendered and also structured according to age and training processes: it is rare to find a culture where men did the spinning, which was mostly the task of women and children.