Project description
The impact of wool in prehistoric Europe
Studies on European prehistory often prioritise durable materials such as stone, bronze, and iron as the defining elements of the period, overlooking the impact of perishable materials like wool. This has created a need for a deeper understanding of how materials like wool have influenced societies. Supported by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), the WOOL project will investigate the transition from early domesticated sheep, which possessed coarse fleece unsuitable for spinning into yarn, to the emergence of wool-bearing sheep and their substantial impact on pastoral life and textile production. The project will explore the varying timelines of wool adoption across Europe, as well as the changes in husbandry practices prompted by the introduction of wool sheep.
Objective
The story of European prehistory is written in durable materials – stone, bronze and iron define the major archaeological periods and are taken to have shaped corresponding societies. Perishable materials, such as wool, have comparatively little impact on our understandings. However, wool production is highly demanding on societal and economic organisation and produces its own embodied experiences through seasonal production cycles. The earliest domesticated sheep had a hairy fleece, unsuitable for spinning into yarn, so the arrival of wool-bearing sheep fundamentally reorganised pastoral life: requiring novel husbandry practices (plucking/gathering shed wool, castration to increase quality, etc.) and huge investment in yarn/textile production. Its adoption in Bronze Age Europe has even been termed a ‘revolution’ (Sabatini & Bergerbrant 2020), bringing a new material with unique insulating properties, new ways of expressing identities, and new forms of human/animal interaction.
Critically, the timing of this process appears to be uneven. The earliest evidence for wool in Britain is the Rylstone textile, dated to 840–590 BC, while Danish examples, for instance, occur from 1700 BC. This is curious given a known rise in sheep numbers in Southern England throughout the second millennium BC. Could wool really be absent from Britain while revolutionising Europe? ‘The Wool Age’ will define the emergence and growth of the prehistoric wool economy in Britain for the first time and characterise the societal consequences. This will be achieved through a novel triangulation of available evidence (animal bone reports, textile tools, and landscape organisation) which avoids waiting for the chance survival of delicate textiles. Thus, a critical issue to our understanding of societal organisation and European interconnection can be revealed.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistoryprehistory
- social sciencespolitical sciencespolitical transitionsrevolutions
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringtextiles
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
4 Dublin
Ireland