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Agencies of Textile Production in Western Anatolian and Aegean Prehistory

    Christopher Britsch, Barbara Horejs

Textile Workers. Skills, Labour and Status of Textile Craftspeople Between the Prehistoric Aegean and the Ancient Near East, pp. 75-90, 2020/04/30

Proceedings of the Workshop held at 10th ICAANE in Vienna, April 2016


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Abstract

While recent studies reveal more information about prehistoric textile technologies, most of them focus on the tools used in production. We tried to analyse the human (f)actor of the craft, the textile worker. Several methods were used to study both the individual person as well as the communal connections within the craft. We analysed both settlements and burial sites from Early Bronze Age (EBA) 1 western Anatolia and the Aegean. Information about the individuality of the prehistoric textile worker was difficult to obtain. However, studying the social and cultural aspects on a broader, more communal scale was more successful. The results gave an insight into the functioning of craft organisation and labour distribution. We found clear indications of craft organisation within EBA societies. Spatial analyses revealed that textile production was performed by specialised craftspeople in certain designated areas. The social and cultural role of the textile worker could not be completely illustrated. We could, however, discern that textile workers had a distinct social and cultural role within society. Moreover, the analyses helped us to find a promising focus for future studies in this area: the analysis of textile technologies and workers in comparison with other crafts as a social and cultural phenomenon embedded in broader historical developments in prehistory.

Keywords: textile workers; craft specialisation; Early Bronze Age; technology; human agent; burial analysis; spatial analysis; social analysis