The Ancient Greek Economy. Markets, Households and City-States

WHOLE CLOTH 167

Athens, whether that evidence was recovered from domestic settings or from

ergasteria. Reuthner’s omission provides the opportunity to present here the

archaeological evidence for domestic manufacture of cloth and clothing. By

using different sources, Reuthner and I reach some of the same conclusions.

Wool and flax, the two fibers most commonly spun and woven by the

Greeks, are both subject to rot and thus few traces of ancient Greek cloth

have survived; those that do survive were recovered exclusively in funer-

ary contexts, such as from tombs at Koropi (Attica), Eleusis, the Athenian

Kerameikos, Kalyvia, Pherae, and Kerch in the Crimea.^1 In Greek antiquity,

both woolen and linen threads were woven on the warp-weighted loom

(Barber 1991 :  91–113), although we know that smaller scale weaving was

accomplished on the back-strap loom and tablets, both of which have left no

remains (Clark 1983 ; Jenkins and Williams 1985 ). The warp-weighted loom

was fashioned from two long beams that stood against a wall and its vertical

warp threads were held taut by weights tied to their ends; in contrast, the warp

threads were kept straight and tight on the back-strap loom by being anchored

to the weaver’s body.^2 The focus in this paper is on the textiles woven on

warp-weighted looms, but because such looms were composed of wooden

beams and crossbars, none has been recovered from an archaeological context

in Greece. Three warp-weighted looms are reported to have been found in

a Hellenistic context at Tel Bet She’an in Israel but their details have not yet

been published (Cassuto forthcoming). Two footing blocks, probably intended

as counterbalances for the vertical beams of a loom, have been recognized in

an inner room next to the hearth room in a house at Orraon and a further two

blocks similarly positioned were found in a second room of the same house

(Dakaris 1986 : 124; Hoepfner and Schwandner 1994 : 148). Several black- and

red-figured vases provide limited but sufficiently detailed depictions of looms

to allow for the reconstruction of the process of textile production in Greece.^3

The validity of the reconstructions, based on the painted depictions of looms

on Greek vases, was confirmed by the nearly identical warp-weighted looms

still in use in Norway and Northern Finland in the late 1950s, although the

Nordic weavers used large and rudely formed stones instead of shaped clay

weights to keep the tension on the warp threads (Hoffman  1960 ).

Loom weights are often found in some number among the domestic

assemblages of Greek houses, although in many excavations large numbers

of weights are housed uncatalogued in the storerooms. The survival of Greek

loom weights, and thus the solid evidence for textile manufacture, might not

be as complete as has previously been assumed. There is ample evidence from

several periods that loom weights were sometimes fashioned of unfired clay.

In his study of the large-scale weaving operations at Gordion in the Iron

Age, Burke ( 2010 :  116–8) has noted that most of the loom weights used at

the central Anatolian site were originally shapeless lumps of sun-dried mud,