YARNSCAPE: Ecological Economies of Ancient Textiles

Project Information

YARNSCAPE

Grant agreement ID: 840892

DOI

10.3030/840892

Project closed

EC signature date 17 April 2019

Start date 1 December 2020

End date 30 November 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 172 932,48

EU contribution

€ 172 932,48

Coordinated by

Institut Català d'Arqueologia Clàssica
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - YARNSCAPE (YARNSCAPE: Ecological Economies of Ancient Textiles)

Reporting period: 2020-12-01 to 2022-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Cloth makes the world go round. On birth, a human baby is wrapped in swaddling before she even feeds. On death, survivors must pick out the deceased’s best clothes for his burial, cremation or spiritual onward journey. The modern textile industry, through large-scale harvesting, manufacture and circulation of yarns, cloth, skills and labour, is the cornerstone of capitalist economic regimes and their globalizing colonial expansion in modern and recent history, driving the enslavement of human labour around its reproduction and devoting vast tracts of land to fibre procurement. How far back can we trace this dual biological and sociological impact of textile industries?

YARNSCAPES, aimed to 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. The objective of this project is, therefore, to develop a new set of scientific techniques to allow us to first identify and then explain the changing relationship between yarn and the environment.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

A series of different scientific techniques were investigated to identify their applicability and usefulness to study the relationship between ancient environments and ancient textile production. These included geospatial cloud computing, drone data collection, and the interpretation of palaeoecological proxies such as pollen and similar botanic indicators, erosion and sedimentation patterns, archaeological features indicating particular agroeconomic uses or generalised climate proxies.

The results of these investigated support the hypothesized applicability and potential the scientific techniques and approaches proposed. In the case-study region, the area around ancient Panormos on the Milesian peninsula (in modern Turkey). Remains of field systems apparently designed for pastoral management of sheep were recorded using spatial mapping techniques and analyzed from different methodological perspectives to reveal a dense landscape devoted to yarn, in this case wool, production.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This project has pushed the fields of textile research and landscape archaeology closer together by searching for the origin of the biological and sociological impact of textile of industries. The methodological toolkits explored during the course of this project (geospatial computing, drone data collection and palaeoecological indicators) will prove helpful for future research into this field. Understanding the symbiosis and parasitism between human productive potential and the affordances of natural environment is relevant for understanding the two-way impact between textiles and the environment in the past and in the future.

Landscape view showing pastoral field systems in case-study region, Milesia