The ecology of exchange: Textiles from Shahr -i Sokhta, eastern Iran

The aim of this dissertation is to put textile and fiber analysis into the mainstream of archaeological materials analysis. This study illustrates the broad array of findings which can be derived from precise identification of fibers from well-provenienced archaeological textiles. The material here studied is a corpus of textile fragments from Shahr-i Sokhta, an important site in eastern Iran which was occupied from the end of the fourth to the beginning of the second millennium BC. This group of textile fragments constitutes one of the most important in the world, as they chronicle the early development of the woolly fleece of sheep