Ricerc@Sapienza

The aim of research project is to provide new approaches and new documentation on the textile culture in the ancient and post antique Mediterranean by investigating textile materials and evidences of different ages and provenances. Textile culture is one of the most peculiar expressions of Mediterranean history as a core of the modern Europe. The Archaeology and Archaeometry of Textiles is a project that goes far beyond the usual archaeological analysis into multidisciplinary research analysing technological-anthropological-economic factors of the textile production from antiquity through medieval and early modern age, till the pre-industrial period. For this purpose, Sapienza representatives of humanities and sciences join in and work together closely: archaeologists and experimental archaeologists, economic historians, scientists such as chemists, biologists, physicists, and textile researchers and conservators are involved in the different activities of the project. The project activities will take archaeological `case studies¿ into account from different areas of the ancient and post-antique Mediterranean. The wide chronological range of the selected cases is considered to be above all effective to detect continuities and changes: this comparative approach through ages and peoples can reveal that textile handicraft and technological traditions usually last for ages and are not being cut off by new political constellations. In this perspective, a unique key study is presented by the Pompeian textiles. The project is tackling the proposed themes in accordance with multidisciplinary approach: This joint effort is required not only by the heterogeneous nature of the archaeological evidences but also by the objectives of the research, which is investigating highly diversified phenomena such as (1) archaeological materials and the contexts, economic factors (2) diagnostic approaches to textile analyses (3) conservation practices concerning textile artefacts.