Interweaving Colonial and Local Networks: Textile Production in Early Iron Age Iberia

Summary

The role of textile production and consumption in the formation of Early Iron Age states in Mediterranean Europe has been often neglected in favour of other economic activities such as pottery making and distribution, as well as metallurgy. In the Western Mediterranean, connectivity has been mainly addressed through the study of Phoenician and/or Greek pottery in local settlements and viceversa. However, intensive production and consumption of textiles was at the heart of urbanisation throughout the history of the world. Cloth was used as an ethnic and identity marker, as a tribute, as a trade product, and as an elite way of self-promotion, among many other things. Textile production and consumption are thus a fruitful venue to understand colonial relations in the region, as well as the interactions between both local communities and between them and the colonisers. In this paper, I focus on those interactions exploring several case studies of textile production in Iberia from the 8th-5th century BC.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Connectivities in Prehistoric and Classical West/Central Mediterranean

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17035