FROM USE WEAR TO USER: HOW LITERARY SOURCES CAN HELP UNDERSTAND GRAECO-ROMAN TEXTILE TOOLS
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-03-18

Traces of use wear suggest long-time relationships between user and tool. For Graeco-Roman material, however, use wear analysis rarely permits conclusions on the identity or experience of those who handled specific tools. Attentive reading of textual sources, informed by archaeological and experimental investigations alongside the text’s literary context, complement the picture. Inscriptions on textile tools offer glimpses of how users related to the implements of their craft. Alberti (2018) highlights messages of practical information: some whorls at Vindolanda are inscribed with instructions e.g. on spin direction ensuring consistency in output. Other inscribed tools imply a joke shared between tool and user (e.g. the spindle whorl inscribed ‘imple me, puella’, Wild 1970: 33) and evoke an all-female usage context (cf. Beltran Lloris & Beltran Lloris 2012 on loomweights from Caesar Augusta). In bilingual, inscribed spindle whorls from Autun, tools express the user’s identity (Mullen forthcoming). Yet in most contexts, it remains unclear who exercised controlled the inscribed messages: were they created for or by the user? Do they reflect or influence the attitudes of the tool user(s)? More extensive literary texts throw light on the emotional attachment between user and craft implements, and elucidate how entanglements between craftspeople and their tools were perceived by those around them. Tales of mythological craftswomen morphing bodily into their work evidence the close connection, blurring tool and user identity (Ov. Met. 4, 6; Symphos. 17), while other passages, focalised through the craftsperson, suggest a perception of their tools as a source of security both financial and emotional. The paper examines in detail Greek epigrams imitating dedications on textile tools, which detail the experience of their literary users, and a passage from Claudian which ties the weaver’s tool and their personal and emotional attachments specifically together with traces left on the tools by the user’s hands.


Author(s): Öhrman, Magdalena (University of Wales Trinity Saint David)