Bronze Age Textile & Wool Economy: The Case of the Terramare Site of Montale, Italy

Abstract

At the onset of the 2nd millennium bc, a wool economy emerged across continental Europe. Archaeological, iconographical, and written sources from the Near East and the Aegean show that a Bronze Age wool economy involved considerable specialised labour and large scale animal husbandry. Resting only on archaeological evidence, detailed knowledge of wool economies in Bronze Age Europe has been limited, but recent investigations at the Terramare site of Montale, in northern Italy, document a high density of spindle whorls that strongly supports the existence of village-level specialised manufacture of yarn. Production does not appear to have been attached to an emerging elite nor was it fully independent of social constraints. We propose that, although probably managed by local elites, wool production was a community-based endeavour oriented towards exports aimed at obtaining locally unavailable raw materials and goods.

Approaching sheep herds origins and the emergence of the wool economy in continental Europe during the Bronze Age

“…A wealth of archaeological evidence has shown that woollen textiles came into use across continental Europe at the onset of the second millennium BCE (Bender Jørgensen 1992; Bender Jørgensen and Rast-Eicher 2016; Bender Jørgensen and Rast-Eicher 2018; Gleba and Mannering 2012;Rast-Eicher and Bender Jørgensen 2013), and also that a local production emerged at some sites throughout the following centuries (Belanová Štolcova and Grömer 2010; Bergerbrant 2018; Bergerbrant in press; Earle and Kristiansen 2010b; Sabatini et al 2018). Fully developed wool economies already existed in the Near East during the third millennium BCE as documented by archaeological, iconographical and written sources (e.g.…”

“…Barber 1991; Bender Jørgensen 2018). A significant number of different textile tools and high percentages of sheep/goat among the faunal remains was recently demonstrated at the Hungarian Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000-1500/1400 BCE) site of Százhalombatta-Földvár (Bergerbrant 2018;Vretemark 2010) and at the Italian Middle and Recent Bronze Age (c. 1550-1200 BCE) Terramare settlement of Montale in the Po valley (De Grossi Mazzorin and Ruggini 2009;Sabatini et al 2018). The characteristics of the local material suggest that both sites might have been centres of specialized wool manufacture, producing exports in exchange for locally unavailable raw materials such as metals.…”

“…In contrast to other sites of the Po plain, Baggiovara was occupied for a relatively short period of time between the Italian Middle Bronze Age 1 and 2 or c. 1650-1450 BCE (Cardarelli 2009b;Cardarelli et al 2013). The site was chosen for sampling due to its very early date in the Terramare context, which would enable the mapping of the first sheep in the area close to Montale from which consistent evidence has been found for intensive sheepherding and textile production during the rest of the Middle Bronze Age (De Grossi Mazzorin and Ruggini 2009;Sabatini et al 2018).…”

“…Despite the need for more data to better understand the characteristics of the continental wool economy, current research suggests that local production of wool and woollen products emerged and developed in Europe during the Bronze Age (e.g. Becker et al 2016;Bergerbrant 2018;Bergerbrant in press;Gleba 2017;Sabatini et al 2018;Vretemark 2010). Moreover, recent strontium isotope analyses on wool textiles from the Early Bronze Age in Denmark suggest that the clothing found in a number of local elite graves was manufactured mainly with wool produced outside present-day Danish territory, the island of Bornholm excluded (Frei et al 2015;Frei et al 2017; see Thomsen and Andreasen 2019 for baseline discussion).…”

The Urbanization of Northern Italy: Contextualizing Early Settlement Nucleation in the Po Valley

“…Moreover, a comparative approach indicates that an economy based on internal agricultural resources, involved in intensive exploitation and massive landscape modifications, like in the Bronze Age Po Valley, could easily develop collective forms of cooperation (Feinman 2017;Jennings and Earle 2016). This scenario is not in contrast with the suggested presence of certain settlements highly specialized in the mass production of goods, especially textiles (Cardarelli 2018;Sabatini et al 2018).…”