Exploring Ancient Textiles by Alistair Dickey;Margarita Gleba;Sarah Hitchens;Gabriella Longhitano;

Author:Alistair Dickey;Margarita Gleba;Sarah Hitchens;Gabriella Longhitano;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789257267
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2022-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Humans, wool textiles, chronology, and provenance: A case study from the Orenburg region in the southern Urals, Russia

Natalia Shishlina, Olga Orfinskaya, Daria Kiseleva, Anna Mamonova, Lidiya Kuptsova, and Tomasz Goslar

Background

The Bronze Age of northern Eurasia was characterised by rapid socio-economic changes mediated by technological innovation. A secondary products revolution was accompanied by implementation of new technologies for new products and their consumption (Sherratt 1997). Along with the wheel and the plough, the developments that defined the overall trajectory of global economic transformations of that time also included the spread of wool fibre, textile, and garment production. Introduction of wool in prehistoric societies has been studied by many scholars (Barber 1991; Frangipane et al. 2009; Gleba and Mannering 2012; Bender Jørgensen 2015; Becker et al. 2016; Azemard et al. 2019; Sabatini and Bergerbrant 2020; Schier and Pollock 2020). The newly excavated wool textile samples from Eurasian Russia and those re-investigated in old museum collections provide a better understanding of the evolution of wool textile production development.

This paper examines a range of Bronze Age wool textile samples uncovered in the Srubnaya or Timber-Grave culture (nineteenth–fifteenth centuries BC) burials excavated in the Orenburg region in the southern Urals and presents their direct 14C AMS dates. A pilot study of the relative provenance of the animal fibre textiles was also conducted by analysing the strontium isotope composition of four textile samples. Our aim was to trace the geographical mobility of wool-bearing animals, thereby determining the geographical provenance of the wool used for making garments. By assessing variations in the 87Sr/86Sr ratios in tooth enamel of individuals from the four burial grounds where wool textiles were found, we also attempted to determine the level of human mobility within a rather small area of the Tok and Ural interfluve. Then we compared the data from the wool textiles with the human residential mobility. This enabled a better understanding of local wool production.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.