Twenty chapters present the range of current research into the study of textiles and dress in classical antiquity, stressing the need for cross and inter-disciplinarity study in order to gain the fullest picture of surviving material. Issues addressed include: the importance of studying textiles to understand economy and landscape in the past; different types of embellishments of dress from weaving techniques to the (late introduction) of embroidery; the close links between the language of ancient mathematics and weaving; the relationships of iconography to the realities of clothed bodies including a paper on the ground breaking research on the polychromy of ancient statuary; dye recipes and methods of analysis; case studies of garments in Spanish, Viennese and Greek collections which discuss methods of analysis and conservation; analyses of textile tools from across the Mediterranean; discussions of trade and ethnicity to the workshop relations in Roman fulleries. Multiple aspects of the production of textiles and the social meaning of dress are included here to offer the reader an up-to-date account of the state of current research. The volume opens up the range of questions that can now be answered when looking at fragments of textiles and examining written and iconographic images of dressed individuals in a range of media.

This volume is part of a pair together withPrehistoric, Ancient Near Eastern and Aegean Textiles and Dress: an interdisciplinary anthology edited by Mary Harlow, Cécile Michel and Marie-Louise Nosch, Isbn 9781782977193

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Weaving the Threads: methodologies in textile and dress research for the Greek and Roman world – the state of the art and the case for cross-disciplinarity
• Chapter 2: Embellishment Techniques of Classical Greek Textiles
• Chapter 3: The Importance of Beginnings: gender and reproduction in mathematics and weaving
• Chapter 4: Representation and Realities: fibulas and pins in Greek and Near Eastern iconography
• Chapter 5: Dressing the Citharode: a chapter in Greek musical and cultic imagery
• Chapter 6: Alchemical Textiles: colourful garments, recipes and dyeing techniques in Graeco-Roman Egypt
• Chapter 7: The Conservation of a 5th-Century BC excavated Textile Find from the Kerameikos Cemetery at athens
• Chapter 8: Transport amphoras and Loomweights: integrating elements of ancient Greek economies?
• Chapter 9: The Wool Basket: function, depiction and meaning of the kalathos
• Chapter 10: Unravelling the Tangled Threads of ancient Embroidery: a compilation of written sources and archaeologically preserved textiles
• Chapter 11: New archaeological data for the Understanding of Weaving in Herakleia, Southern Basilicata, italy
• Chapter 12: Roman Art: what can it tell us about dress and textiles? A discussion on the use of visual evidence as sources for textile research
• Chapter 13: Where marble meets Colour: surface texturing of hair, skin and dress on roman marble portraits as support for painted polychromy
• Chapter 14: Dressing the Adulteress
• Chapter 15: Looking Between loom and laundry: vision and communication in ostian fulling workshops
• Chapter 16: Roman Textiles and Barbarians: some observations on textile exchange between the roman Empire and Barbaricum
• Chapter 17: The multiple Functions and lives of a Textile: the reuse of a garment
• Chapter 18: Discovering late Antique Textiles in the Public Collections in Spain: an interdisciplinary research project
• Chapter 19: A New Approach to the Understanding of Historic Textiles
• Chapter 20: Burial Threads: a late antique textile and the iconography of the Virgin Annunciate spinning