This paper discusses some of the insights that have been gained from the study of the textile tools from the Etruscan settlement of Poggio Civitate di Murlo and coeval textiles recovered from the adjacent cemetery site of Poggio Aguzzo di Murlo. Over 1,600 textile tools (including spindle whorls, loom weights, and spools) are analysed from a functional perspective, and results suggest that the textiles found in burials were likely produced at the site. This new information is discussed in light of other subsistence and craft activities documented at the settlement, all of which indicate an inward-oriented economy that catered to the local elites and the populations they controlled.

This article investigates the production of textiles in Thrace during the first millennium BC. It presents a functional analysis of textile-production tools from three towns in Thrace: Koprivlen, Adzhiiska Vodenitsa near Vetren, and Seuthopolis, and from Kastanas in Macedonia. The analysis shows that over the course of the Iron Age, textile production became more diversified and intensive. This process unfolded parallel to the emergence of opulent elite burials and urban communities. By examining a wider range of archaeological, iconographic, and textual data, the article contributes to our understanding of how the demand for textiles, and their consumption in different socially meaningful ways, connects to changes in production.

Preprint accepted by World Archaeology 08.11.2020 "It is right that those who work for their living and the common people should have more than the high-born and the wealthy, because it is the common people that set the ships in motion and give the power of the city."

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This paper reviews archaeological publications and fieldwork related to Macedonia and Thrace of the past five years, covering the Early Iron Age to the Hellenistic period, with reference also to sites and projects in Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Turkey. Published syntheses reveal the priorities that have driven archaeological research to date (for example funerary monuments, ties to historical figures and narratives, pottery) and a need for more studies on other aspects of social history and archaeology, such as subsistence, crafts and households. Fieldwork at settlements has continued over the years, but few are being dug and published to current standards. A discussion is growing about the role and use of the countryside, and field surveys and excavations are providing new data on this. Fortified rural sites in Greece and Bulgaria may indicate that similar social processes were afoot, but full publication and the retrieval of relevant comparative data, especially faunal and botanical, are essential for a better understanding of potential differences.