Kevin Ennis, "Economies of Weaving: Women, Labor, and Textiles at Morgantina from the Bronze Age to the Republican Era"

Abstract: Textiles were everywhere in antiquity—as clothing, blankets, carpets, and much more—and their production was remarkably labor intensive. Textile labor was also one of the only productive activities which (at least in certain times and places) was explicitly gendered as women’s work. In this dissertation, I investigate how women’s labor was mobilized and allocated for textile manufacture, focusing in particular on the household as a central locus of production and consumption in the ancient Mediterranean.   

The archaeological site of Morgantina in east-central Sicily serves as my primary case study. The site is especially apt for this analysis because of its unique collection of over 2,000 textile tools, well-documented excavation history dating back almost 70 years, and long span of habitation. Textile tools have been recovered in contexts dating to all major periods at the site from the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2400–1600 BC) through the Republican era (2nd and 1st centuries BC), with particularly important assemblages dating to the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods. The wide chronological span of these artifacts affords the opportunity to connect long-term changes with broader sociopolitical and economic phenomena.   

This study makes three main contributions. First, I utilize the vast archive of notebooks and drawings from previous excavations at Morgantina to date a sizable number of textile tools recovered at the site. The result is a sequence of artifacts spanning two millennia—unparalleled at other archaeological sites—which both demonstrates broad continuities in the technologies used for spinning and weaving, and also identifies important moments of technical innovation (particularly during the transition from the Archaic to the Classical period). Second, I offer a new methodology for studying textile tools which combines the close analysis of archaeological context with recently developed techniques for reconstructing production possibilities. Lastly, I draw on these historical and methodological insights to track changes in the socioeconomic organization of textile manufacture. My findings call into question pervasive narratives in the field of economic history which focus on population growth and urbanization as the prime movers of craft specialization. In place of these narratives, I foreground an array of neglected factors—such as gender, the structure of the household, dependence on enslaved labor, monetization, and political formations—which were pivotal in promoting and constraining specialization in antiquity. My dissertation therefore shows how a close analysis of small-scale archaeological data can challenge and revise big economic narratives about the past.