In-Between Textiles is a decentred study of how textiles shaped, disrupted, and transformed subjectivities in the age of the first globalisation. The volume presents a radically cross-disciplinary ...approach that brings together world-leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, conservators, curators, historians, scientists, and weavers to reflect on the power of textiles to reshape increasingly contested identities on a global scale between 1400 and 1800. Contributors posit the concept of 'in-between textiles', building upon Homi Bhabha's notion of in-betweenness as the actual material ground of the negotiation of cultural practices and meanings; a site identified as the battleground over strategies of selfhood and the production of identity signs troubled by colonialism and consumerism across the world. In-Between Textiles establishes cutting-edge conversations between textile studies, critical cultural theory, and material culture studies to examine how textiles created and challenged experiences of subjectivity, relatedness, and dis/location that transformed social fabrics around the globe.
Having followed with great interest the latest scholarly literature on ontology-related archaeologies, especially in this journal, this essay will problematise the extractive nature of much of this ...scholarship in the long-history of Western imperialism, in which Indigenous knowledge has been collected, depoliticised, classified, and then re-signified within Western frameworks.
Archaeologists, like many other scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities, are particularly concerned with the study of past and present subalterns. Yet the very concept of ‘the subaltern’ is ...elusive and rarely theorized in archaeological literature, or it is only mentioned in passing. This article engages with the work of Gramsci and Patricia Hill Collins to map a more comprehensive definition of subalternity, and to develop a methodology to chart the different ways in which subalternity is manifested and reproduced.
Studying textile production in the middle Guadiana basin between the seventh and fifth centuries BC, this article reveals the significance of textiles for the development and change of economic ...complexity in rural societies in Iron Age south-western Iberia. Textiles were at the very heart of the economic transformation of the area in this period. The functional properties of textile tools and their implications for manufacturing different types of threads and woven textiles show that in the seventh and sixth centuries BC the production of textiles was household-based and mostly for self-consumption. From the late sixth century and especially in the fifth century BC, however, the increasing specialisation of textile production and the appearance of workshops heralded new economic relations. By examining textile production and artisans' skills and knowledge, this study reconsiders our understanding of craft production, societal change, and economic complexity among the rural societies of Iron Age Iberia.
The period between AD 700 and 1500 has been recently labeled as “Africa’s global Golden Age.” This is particularly true for the Shay communities living on the Muslim-Christian frontier in the ninth ...to fourteenth century AD. Located in the center of the Ethiopian highlands, the Shay faced the expansion of the Christian kingdoms and the advance of the Muslim polities. In an increasingly violent context of religious conversion and war between the two religious powers, the Shay stressed their independence by burying their deceased in collective structures, contrary to the mortuary practices of both Christians and Muslims, and by including precious local and global grave goods in their tombs. The laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) analysis of 34 glass beads shows how the Shay communities benefited from the Islamic global trade routes at the time, particularly the Middle East, Egypt, and the Indo-Pacific networks. This article examines the crucial role of global glass beads in the construction of a trans-corporeal landscape among the Shay that served the emergence and consolidation of the social self as a collective identity against their Christian and Muslim neighbors.
The archaeology of indigenous houses in the western Mediterranean during the Orientalising period has been largely neglected. Scholars have traditionally focused on funerary contexts and the ...'Orientalising' style of native elites, to the point that we know little of the everyday life of people before and during colonial contact in Italy and Iberia. Drawing on the Deleuzian concept of becoming (different), this study explores the flow of continuities and discontinuities in houses and household activities in two western Mediterranean regions-the Bay of Naples in Italy and southern Spain-between the ninth and sixth century bc. The aim is to obtain a better understanding of the close relationships between domestic space, people, material culture, memory, sensorial experiences, and sociocultural practices in these two areas over a period of almost 400 years.
International cultural development projects entail a neoliberal agenda that frequently echoes colonial ideologies and discourses. Using the case study of Chaouen, a northern city in Morocco, I argue ...in this paper that former colonies and aid-receiving countries usually overlap, and serve the former metropolises to continue controlling the former colony’s human and economic resources. I discuss how the former colonial power, in this case Spain, regulates and promotes a particular heritage discourse that has conveniently been depoliticised. I further contend that in line with previous colonial narratives, Spain has silenced the painful history of struggle and resilience of the inhabitants of Chaouen.
Colouring the Mediterranean Marín-Aguilera, Beatriz; Iacono, Francesco; Gleba, Margarita
Journal of Mediterranean archaeology,
01/2018, Letnik:
31, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Purple textiles were highly valued in the ancient Mediterranean as a symbol of prestige, social status and power. Despite the numerous publications focused on the production and spread of purple dye ...technologies, the discussion regarding this particular dye has often been compartmentalised regionally (eastern or western Mediterranean) and chronologically (second or first millennium bc). The aim of this paper is threefold: (1) to propose a full chaîne opératoire for the production of shellfish-purple-dyed textiles; (2) to synthesise the archaeological evidence on production and consumption of such textiles in the entire Mediterranean before the Romans; and (3) to discuss the social implications of the production and consumption of these textiles, to gain a better understanding of their economic and social significance.
Open access: Attribution—Non Commercial—NoDerivs / CC BY-NC-ND
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