YARNSCAPE: Ecological Economies of Ancient Textiles

ended

“YARNSCAPE: ecological economies of ancient textiles”, will investigate the relationship between textiles and the emergence and expansion of early complex societies, through examination of published data from the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia in the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE, and by testing a set of innovative methods against an in-depth study of primary data from a field site on the Milesian Peninsula (Turkey). Accumulated archaeological and historical data hint at a deep cogenerative relationship between complex urban or market-style economies and textiles, but the impact of cloth on long-term economy and environment has been too often been sidelined as ephemeral. There is therefore a critical need to develop innovative techniques to access the impact of textile industries over the longue durée. Through training in Spain, Denmark and Germany in specific advanced approaches to 1) cloud-based geoprocessing of multi-temporal remote sensing data; 2) spatial analysis of ancient landscapes; 3) multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental indicators of fibre production; and 4) ethnoarchaeological study of agroeconomy of textiles; the project will enable the ER to develop a robust, cutting-edge toolkit and set of theoretical approaches to ancient fibre production and their economies. This will place the ER in position to design a global comparative project devoted to delineating and explaining the relationship between social complexity and textile production.