Abstract: There are various indications for textile production in the ancient city of Pompeii and its vicinity, but archaeological research was mainly focused on ...
17-20 October, Padova
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M. Galli, F. Coletti, C. Lemorini, S. Mitschke, The ‘Textile Culture at Pompeii’ Project Abstract: There are various indications for textile production in the ancient city of Pompeii and its vicinity, but archaeological research was mainly focused on corresponding features in the urban structures so far. In this regard it has to be noted that the textiles themselves have only met little interest. The same applies to the elements of dress preserved as impressions on the so-called calchi. This apparent lack is remarkable, as the textile evidences from the Vesuvian area can not only be dated exactly, but also because they provide the possibility of a comparison of one type of material in different variants of preservation. In order to fill this lacuna the Research Project “Cultura Tessile a Pompei” was initiated. The aim of this multidisciplinary project is to provide new input to the ongoing debate on the significance of textile economy in the Vesuvian area in antiquity by looking on textile culture as a whole. Investigations on the spinning and weaving contexts and materials were carried out by M. Galli and C. Lemorini; selected examples of both calchi and textiles are evaluated by S. Mitschke and F. Coletti. The possibility of carrying out archaeometric analysis on textile microsamples sheds light on local and imported goods as well as standardized and high quality textile products. By this means it can be stated that the results of these multidisciplinary research activities clearly reveal untapped potential in this field. Keywords: Pompeii, 79 AD, domus-textrinae, instrumenta textilia, textiles, gold, experimental archaeology, archaeometry, calchi, 3D-scan.
TEXTILE CULTURE AT POMPEII: SOME REMARKS1 Since the twentieth century, in the ‘primitivist-modernist’ debate on ancient economies, the city of Pompeii has played a fundamental role2. Seen in a historiographic perspective, it must be stressed that the evaluation of the extraordinary historical and archaeological documentation related to Pompeii, crystallized by the catastrophe of 79 AD, has long shifted between two opposite hermeneutical poles. On the one hand, in the wake of Rostovtzeff's reconstruction, Pompeii has been imagined enthusiastically as a ‘textile town’, with an intensive production and commerce of textiles, garments, etc., and on the other, according to a more sceptical Weberian-Finleyesque vision of ancient economies, an ideal-type of ‘consumer city’ has been postulated alternatively for Pompeii. Even if in the past decades scholarship has made a just claim for alternative approaches and for much more dynamic models to gain an understanding of Roman urban production and related economic
Marco Galli, Sapienza University of Rome. The “Textile Culture at Pompeii” Project started in 2014 as multidisciplinary research conducted by Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Pompei, Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità – Sapienza University of Rome, Curt Engelhorn Archäometrie Zentrum (CEZA), Mannheim; from the very beginning, prof. dr. M. Galli was responsible for the conception and organization of the project, which he co-led with prof. dr. E. Pernicka (Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg and CEZA). The authors are greatly indebted to the Soprintendenza Speciale di Pompei, above all to the General Director, prof. dr. Massimo Osanna for his invaluable support; we are grateful to the colleagues of the Laboratorio di Scienze Applicate di Pompei, dr. E. De Carolis and dr. A. Martellone, as well as to dr. A. Capurso and dr. S.M. Masseroli, for the fruitful cooperation. We particularly want to thank dr. L. Melillo, curator of textile collection of National Archaeological Museum of Naples (MANN), for her generous cooperation with the project. Special thanks go to the following scholars and institutions who have worked generously with us at various stages of the research: dr. D. Döppes, CEZA; prof. dr. M. P. Colombini and dr. S. Bracci, CNR-ICVBC – Florence; dr. M. Fedi, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare – Frascati (RM); prof. dr. I. Degano, Department of Chemistry - Pisa University; dr. S. N. Cesaro, Department of Chemistry - Sapienza; dr. A. Perilli. 2 FLOHR (2013 a); see also WILSON (2002), esp. 234-236. 1
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growth, the question of Pompeian textile manufacturing in particular is still subject to conflicting positions. It is not possible to provide here an exhaustive account of the ‘Pompeian debate’, but it is worthwhile recalling some recurrent patterns in recent studies. Generally, much more attention has been devoted to dyeing and fulling workshops and to the installations for felt-making, which offer archaeologically tangible evidence. In this connection, it should be stressed that many wide-ranging studies and surveys, such as Bogard’s and Monteix’s3, have systematically reconstructed a complex urban textile network. But at the same time, the real extension and infrastructure of the town’s textile production are still under review. Did Pompeii have a small-scale industry functional to local markets or rather a flourishing export-oriented manufacture? In this connection, it should be mentioned that previous archaeological identifications of textile installations have now been called into question. For example, the so-called officinae lanifricariae 4 , which were usually associated in the past with raw wool processing, have recently been excluded from the group of textile workshops. Above all, the most problematic issue seems to concern spinning and weaving activities. According to Jongman’s «minimalizing assumptions» 5 , there would seem to be no reliable evidence of archaeologically recognizable workshops that can testify to these important and time-consuming phases in the textile production of Pompeii6. The risk of «throw[ing] the baby out with the bathwater» 7 appears evident, that is to say, underestimating the potential of archaeological and historical documentation, especially in regard to spinning-weaving activities. Before answering the question of whether or not Pompeii was a ‘consumer city’, it may be more fruitful to process the whole range of available data concerning the different phases of textile production. In this perspective, the “Textile Culture at Pompeii” Project aims to investigate its spinning and weaving activities by analysing for the first time in a systematic way the entire collection of preserved textile fragments and, when possible, related traces on the human calchi8, also with a renewed attention to contexts. In order to reconstruct a micro-history of textile manufacturing in Pompeii we have formulated our multidisciplinary research as an interplay of different approaches (fig.1). The combination of old and new data is intended to highlight contexts, agents and tools as well as offering an archaeological-archeometric, in depth analysis of preserved textiles, as the following preliminary remarks show. CONTEXTS AND AGENTS The postulated fragmentary documentation related to spinning and weaving activities in Pompeii offers arguments rather against the existence of a professional, market-oriented production, than in favour of a household-oriented production serving exclusively internal needs. From a methodological point of view, it is must be stressed that 1) neither in-depth analyses of contexts and possible textile activity, nor systematic and comprehensive studies of material culture, i.e. quantity, quality, distribution of all the spinning-weaving artefacts found in Pompeii, were carried out in previous studies; 2) the search for ‘professional’ spinning and/or weaving in Pompeii, as well as in ancient
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BORGARD, PUYBARRET (2003) (2004); MONTEIX (2011). FLOHR (2013 a) 57-60, fig. 2-4. 5 For JONGMAN’s (1988) minimalism, see FLOHR – WILSON (2017) 81 and footnote 55 with bibliography. 6 FLOHR (2013 a) 66-67. 7 WILSON (2002) 235. 8 See here MITSCHKE, and GALLI et al. (2017). 4
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