Textile production is one of the oldest crafts and has played a crucial role in societies. Yet, very few archaeological textiles are preserved and we must therefore rely on the remains of textile tools. In this paper, a group of scholars reviews two millennia of textile tools from Bronze Age Arslantepe. The size and weight of the tools inform about the textile production carried out at the site and illustrate how this production changes over time. Fortunate fi nds of textile remains at Arslantepe allow for an insight into the fi bre and techniques. The remains of an early 3rd millennium goat hair textile of exceptional quality demonstrate the advanced state of the craft and the functionality of the textile tools. Résumé : La production de textiles, l'une des plus anciennes activités artisanales, a joué un rôle majeur dans les sociétés. Pourtant, très peu de textiles archéologiques ayant été préservés, il faut travailler sur les restes d'outils liés à la production textile. Les auteurs de cet article analysent les outils datés de l'âge du Bronze couvrant ainsi une période de deux millénaires à Arslantepe. La taille et le poids des outils renseignent sur la production textile du site et montrent comment cette production a évolué au fi l du temps. Les trouvailles exceptionnelles de fragments de tissu permettent d'envisager les fi bres et les techniques utilisées. Les restes archéologiques d'un tissu en poils de chèvre, d'une qualité exceptionnelle et datant du début du III e millénaire, témoignent d'une haute technicité de l'artisanat textile et de la fonction des outils.
Knowledge of textile history, including fibre, technology, tools etc, is essential and absolutely necessary for our understanding of the past. Textile research has become an important field of archaeology and has an enormous potential, being able to tell us about economic, social, chronological, and cultural aspects of past societies. Due to poor preservation conditions, few textiles have survived in the Near East. However, the few existing fragments, in combination with other sources, provide evidence of a well-developed knowledge of how to use fibres for producing textiles. Furthermore, the analyses demonstrate that several types of plant and animal fibres were used in textile production. Flax fibres and sheep wool are considered to be the two most important textile fibres from Neolithic to modern times. Information gathered from the analysis of textiles suggests that it is highly plausible that the different stages of processing fi bres were similar across ancient Eurasia even if it is, of course, important to consider that different climate zones will affect both the need for and access to fi bres. Archaeobotanical and zoo ostelogical material also provide information on the use of textile fi bres. Additionally, different types of installations (e. g. retting pits, workshops) and textile tools (e. g. mallets, spindles, looms) would have been used and even if many tools were made of perishable materials textile tools such as spindle whorls and loom weights are well known from archaeological contexts. Therefore, this paper will give a basic framework for textile production that will provide important insights into the procurement and processing of plant and animal fibres and briefly on spinning and weaving. This will be accomplished with information from archaeological and written sources used in combination with ethnography and experimental archaeology.
Référence électronique Eva Andersson Strand, Ulla Mannering et Marie-Louise Nosch, « Mise en oeuvre d'une approche globale des textiles anciens au Centre de recherche sur les textiles de Copenhague »,
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