170 BARBARA TSAKIRgIS
kept close at hand. In his examination of the remains of the nearly undisturbed
domestic assemblages excavated at Olynthus, Cahill ( 2002 : 170) has proposed
that a loom with weaving in progress could not be relocated; however, based
on the testimony of modern weavers, Ault ( 2005 : 78), in his publication of
the remains of the Classical houses at Halieis in the Argolid, thinks that looms
could be moved. No furniture was necessary for work at the loom, but a stool
could be useful when the weaver was tiring of the task. Once the weaver
passed the shuttle through the line of the taut, vertical warp threads, the weft
was pushed into position using a comb or beater. While combs and beaters, like
stools, were most often fashioned of wood, fragments of bone beaters have been
excavated at Euesperides (Megias and Wilson 2008 : 56). One generous donor
dedicated a silver beater bar to Athena on the Acropolis in Athens, and because
of the intrinsic value of the metal, it was likely a dedicatory object rather than
a tool used in household textile manufacture (IG I^3 403 lines 16–17).
Depending on the size of the cloth being woven, the loom might be well
over a meter wide. Most estimates put the width of a loom used to weave
a peplos at 1.45–1.85 meters. The number of weights used to hold the warp
threads taut varies in scholarly opinion, depending on how many threads were
held fast by each weight. The experiments of Mårtensson, Nosch, and Strand
( 2009 ) prove that both the weight and thickness of the weights are critical fac-
tors in both the ease of setting up the loom and the evenness of the weave in
the finished product. Barber ( 1991 : 104) argues that a loom could be outfitted
with as few as six weights; most estimates for a full loom number range from
twenty to forty weights (e.g., Hoffman 1960 : 24 ff. [13–59 weights]). Some
scholars propose many more, with the higher number predicated on the use
of smaller weights (Davidson 1952 : 147; Davidson and Thompson 1943 : 70;
Sofianou 2011 : 425).
Ornamentation of the cloth and the sewing of those textiles which required
more than weaving and wrapping around the body added to the total pro-
duction time of any garment or household textile. While embroidery was not
common in Greek clothing, Loftus ( 1998 : 15) has argued that it was introduced
to Athens for luxury garments in the fifth century BCE, perhaps as both work-
men and clothing were imported from the eastern Mediterranean. Examples
of cloth with designs woven into the fabric are known from both vase paint-
ings and sculpture as well as from the Panathenaic peplos with its woven depic-
tion of the Gigantomachy (Barber 1992 : 112–17).^6 The textile fragment from
Koropi was once similarly embroidered with gold thread wrapped around a
silk core (Miller 1997 : 80–1). The process of dyeing would also add to the time
needed for creating garments. The very recognizable murex shell does survive
in the archaeological record, but few if any have been recovered from domes-
tic contexts to indicate domestic dyeing in the Classical period. The absence
of murex in houses is due either to the expense of the mollusk or to the