TEXTILES AND SEALS: INVESTIGATING RELATIONS BETWEEN TEXTILE PRODUCTION AND SEALS
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-03-18

The ‘Textiles and Seals’ research project investigates the multiple and complex relationships between textile production, the iconography of seals and sealing practices in Bronze Age Greece. These relations can be traced today in the wide-ranging evidence, comprising textile imprints on the underside of and inside seal-impressed lumps of clay, seal-impressed textile tools (especially loom weights) and textile production-related motifs in the Aegean seals imagery. The main research questions that are posed by this project, aim to explain the use of textiles in sealing practices and the use of seals in the administration of textile production, as well as the meaning and diachronic frequency of references to textile production that appear in the iconography of Aegean glyptic. In order to facilitate the achievement of these tasks, an Open Access data base has been designed specifically for this project through the services of the Digital Humanities Laboratory of the University of Warsaw. In this paper, I will briefly demonstrate the structure of this data base and the possibilities of its search engine. Although the data entry has not yet been finished, this new comparative approach to investigate the relationships between different kinds of evidence, i.e. the imagery of seals, textile imprints and seal-impressed textile tools, has already proved to be a powerful tool. It offers new interpretations based on a large number of records and, until now, unexplored combinations of various data.


Author(s): Ulanowska, Agata (Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw)