TORN THREADS: FORGETTING TO TABLET WEAVE AND URBANIZATION AT GABII
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-01-29

Studies of technological change in pre-Roman Italy have tended to focus on the adoption of new technologies and their relationship with concurrent socio-political changes. In this paper, I contend that it is equally fruitful to consider the disappearance of technological systems and the processes of social change embedded in the act of forgetting. The Latin site of Gabii provides my primary case study for contextualizing the act of forgetting. Gabii provides a diachronic window into changes in textile technologies across Latium’s urban boundary that have been noted anecdotally across the Italian peninsula but seldom investigated in depth. Recent excavations of multiple domestic complexes at Gabii have revealed evidence for changes in textile technologies as the site transitioned from a collection of proto-urban hut settlements to an orthogonally planned, walled “city”. At Gabii, as at other Italian sites, specific textile-making tools and evidence for their attendant suite of production techniques (spools/rocchetti, bone tablets, and tablet weaving) are abundant in the pre-urban layers but disappear completely from all non-residual deposits belonging to the urban phases of the site. This paper examines this point of disjunction in elite textile production. In addressing the question of why the Gabines “forgot” how to tablet-weave, I will argue that such considerations tell us much about both the generative role of tablet-weaving in proto-urban communities and the shifting social-networks of textile producers in the subsequent Gabine city. The material changes in textile production seen at Gabii after its “urban moment” can help us understand the changing roles elite men and women played as Italian communities moved from heterarchic, specialized, and household based pre-urban settlements to hierarchic cities.


Author(s): Samuels, Jeffrey (University of Michigan)