Unraveling the Fabric of the Past: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Archaeological Textiles

Textiles are rarely preserved in archaeological contexts, often leading to an incomplete and even biased picture of their role in past cultures. When textiles do survive, however, a wide range of interdisciplinary methods and approaches can be applied to them, leading to information regarding their date, raw materials, and provenance. Indirect evidence consisting of archaeological textile tools, written sources, iconography, as well as archaeobotanical and archaeozoological remains can provide additional evidence about textile production, use, and economy of the resources. These empirical data obtained from the extant archaeological textile finds inform cultural aspects, such as the role of gender in cloth manufacture, long‐distance trade in textiles, and the use of textiles for signalling identities