WHOLE CLOTH 179
the houses on Delos were not catalogued. Two loom weights appear in the
publications of the peristyle houses at Pergamon (Pinkwart and Stammnitz
1984 : 120). The hearth room in House I at Kassope had ‘many’ loom weights,
although the exact number was not specified (Orlandos 1977 : 76). The exca-
vators interpreted the shells found with the weights at Kassope as evidence of
cloth dyeing although the mollusks did not appear in great numbers.
The weights found in the houses at Hellenistic New Halos in Thessalyparallel the Classical examples cited here in both number and find spots.
There is evidence that the Thessalians raised animals for wool, and Haagsma
(2010a: 202) suggests that the age-estimates of the animal bones recovered from
the site support this contention. The preponderance of the bones belonged to
older animals, that is, those kept for their wool production, rather than from
younger animals that were slaughtered for their meat. While five of the six
houses each contain 11 to 37 loom weights, with an average of 21 each, in
the House of Agathon 139 were found. Most of the weights were located in a
room identified as a storage area, but nonetheless, the sheer quantity recovered
in this one house indicates production beyond the needs of a single family. In
the other houses, the weights were recovered in side rooms with little natural
lighting. The houses at Kallitheia in Thessaly also contain ‘a number’ of loom
weights (Haagsma 2010b) and the excavator speculates that there, as at Halos,
there was textile production in excess of one family’s requirements. At both
sites, Haagsma argues, the surplus woven goods were exchanged for cereals to
feed the family.
In the Hellenistic rural villa at Tel Anafa in Israel, Larson and Erdman (forth-coming) posit textile production on a moderate household scale with some
suggestion that textiles were traded for the luxury goods that were found at
this inland site. In the first Hellenistic phase of the building, sixteen whorls and
forty weights were found, fifteen of the latter in a cluster. In the late Hellenistic
phase, over 100 implements for textile production were recovered. As at Pylos
and Halos, the higher proportion of whorls to weights, in contrast to the evi-
dence from the urban sites, might indicate the local shearing of wool and the
spinning of thread.
In the houses at three other Hellenistic sites, scholars have recognizedevidence of commercial production of cloth. The excavators of the terrace
houses at Florina in Macedonia have proposed that the large numbers of
weights found in one house give evidence of production beyond the needs
of the household, but they do not publish the number of weights recov-
ered there (Lilibaki-Akamatis and Akamatis 1990 : 71). At Euesperides in a
house of the third century BCE, seventy-two loom weights were found in
a rough line on the floor; the excavators suspect that there may originally
have been more weights, but they were not recoverable or even recogniz-
able due to having been made of crude brick (Megias and Wilson 2008 ).