LONDON: Despite frequent contact with each other during the Iron Age, textiles in Italy more closely resembled those found in Central Europe while Greece followed the tradition of ancient Near East, according to a study.
Textiles have been and still are widely considered one of the most valuable indicators of individual and group identity.
Even in societies today, people frequently form opinions of others based on the type of cloth they are wearing: tweed is associated with Irish and British country clothing, cashmere with Central Asia and silk with the Far East.
Researchers from University of Cambridge in the UK conducted an analysis of several hundred textile fragments, providing a more detailed definition of the textile cultures in Italy and Greece during the first half of the first millennium BC.
During the Iron Age (1,000-400 BC) people were buried with a lot of metal goods such as personal ornaments, weapons and vessels, researchers said.
These metals are conducive to the preservation of textiles as the metal effectively kills off the micro- organisms which would otherwise consume the organic materials, while at the same time metal salts create casts of textile fibres, thereby preserving the textile microstructure, they said.
Researchers used digital and scanning electron microscopy, high performance liquid chromatography and other advanced methods were able to determine a lot of information including the nature of the raw materials and structural features such as thread diameter, twist direction, type of weaving or binding, and thread count.
The technical differences suggest that during the Iron Age, textiles in Italy more closely resembled those found in Central Europe – associated with the Hallstatt culture that was prevalent in modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovenia – while the textile culture of Greece was largely connected with the Near East.
The ancient Near East was the home of early civilisations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East.
“There is overwhelming evidence for frequent contact between Italy and Greece during the first half of the first millennium BC, but this evidence shows that their textile traditions were technically, aesthetically and conceptually very different,” said Margarita Gleba, from University of Cambridge.
“This means that the populations in these two regions are making an active decision to clothe themselves in a certain way and it may have to do with traditions set up already in the Bronze Age,” Gleba added.
Curiously, by Roman times, the establishment of Greek colonies in southern Italy and more general oriental influences observed in material culture of Italic populations leads towards gradual disappearance of the indigenous textile tradition, researchers said.
Our future research will attempt to understand the cause behind this change in textile culture, they added.
The study was published in the journal Antiquity. (AGENCIES)
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