Ancient Technology

#EAC12 World Tour 2021
***The demand for innovative solutions to pressing ecological and societal challenges is on a constant rise. Ancient technologies provide extensive yet underutilized opportunities to help solve such problems. This paper presents three of these technologies and their successful application in modern contexts based on five illustrating case studies...

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***This paper outlines the experimental weaving project of an ancient Greek chlamys to investigate the weaving production capacity of a typical household and reconstruct women’s contribution to household GDP in ancient Greece. While some scholars have researched finer textiles and tech-niques based on visual evidence...

Evidence that Neanderthals had mastered the production of birch bark tar as an adhesive has generated important and timely debate concerning behavioural complexity. Increased resolution of the data on palaeo-climatic conditions has also brought into sharp focus the need for hominins living in high latitudes to possess complex cultural mechanisms to deal with cold environments...

To date, archaeologists often use a typological approach to assess the functions of bone artefacts from the Roman period. In some of these assigned typological groups, certain artefacts do not have a clear definition. This study aimed to assess whether use-wear analysis combined with experimental archaeology could be applied to bone artefacts from the Roman period as ...

The experiment aimed to investigate certain aspects of the textile dyeing process in Anglo-Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon Britain: substances known as mordants and assists. This aspect of the dyeing process is often omitted by researchers, who mostly focus on dyestuff as a source of colour. Mordants and assists deserve wider research, however, as they play a great part in the dyeing process...

Two metallurgical traditions coexisted in the Chalcolithic Southern Levant: the lost wax casting of polymetallic alloys and the pure copper technology. Details of their operational sequences are still unknown. To date, no production sites of lost wax casting technology have been found. Only the main steps of the pure copper technology can be reconstructed from the archaeological record...

Athenian black-figure and red-figure vases have not been the subject of many studies specifically devoted to vase-forming techniques, since researchers have primarily focused on their decoration. The study of the Attic alabastron, a perfume vase shape produced in Athens between the middle of the sixth century and the beginning of the fourth century BC, shows that different techniques were occasionally used by potters...

An abundance of past research has addressed Iron Age pottery in the Iberian Peninsula since the beginning of archaeological analysis in Spain. However, it has mainly focused on examining historical-cultural aspects linked to specific chronologies and typologies. It is only rarely that studies have been concerned with production processes. Ethnography has traditionally been used to make direct ...

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***Kapa (Hawaiian barkcloth) was the ubiquitous fabric of historic Hawaiʻi, used for everything from clothing to bedding, from swaddling newborns to enshrouding the deceased, and all things in between. This textile is crafted from the bast (inner bark) of several plant species...

This contribution presents the results of experiments using a simple but effective inclusion and void orientation method for identifying shaping techniques on cut and scanned vessels and sherds. Not only does it provide an additional line of complementary evidence for differentiating ceramic chaînes opératoires, but we argue that it offers observations not accessible by other imaging methods and scales of analysis...