EGYARN Unravelling the thread: Textile Production in New Kingdom Egypt
Friday lecture by Chiara Spinazzi-Lucchesi, Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc at the Centre for Textile Research, UCPH.
The EgYarn project will focus on the production of textiles in Egypt during the New Kingdom (1550-1070 BC). It will enable an in-depth comprehension of the chaîne opératoire, identify the main protagonists of textile manufacture (women, men, slaves or private entrepreneurs) and show how domestic and non-domestic production interacted. It will reveal the place of New Kingdom textile practises with respect to Mediterranean and African Late Bronze Age traditions. Lastly, it will build a European collections database of the New Kingdom tools and textiles stored in European museums, bringing them back together again more than a century after their discovery. Textiles, tools (spindles, whorls, parts of looms) and fibres will be analysed in order to understand the production mechanism, while archaeological contexts and textual sources will furnish precious data about the organisation of textile manufacture. Experimental archaeology will provide fundamental clues about ancient fibres, how tools were used and what qualities of thread and textile could be produced using these instruments. Key sites are Deir el-Medina and Gurob, but the project will also encompass textiles and tools from other New Kingdom sites now kept in European Museums.