Amazing stuff!
"When a fire ripped through a wealthy Iberian village 3450 years ago, it left behind heaps of rubble that trapped tools, pots, and jewelry—and, archaeologists argue in a new Antiquity study, one of the oldest looms ever found. The charred, meter-long pine beams, stone weights, and fiber cords open a window on an ancient economy, and perhaps on Bronze Age fashion.
Beginning around 2000 BCE, written sources from Mesopotamia, Mycenae, Egypt and elsewhere indicate that looms and weaving had become a part of daily life. But because they were made of perishable wood, finding an actual loom from prehistoric Europe is extremely rare. “What we find in archaeology is usually just the loom weights, because everything else decays ,” ... “To find a loom like this, just as it was standing there 3500 years ago, is really remarkable.”
Archaeologists found the loom’s wooden frame when they excavated a site near modern-day Alicante, Spain, in 2008. Close by lay nearly 50 clay loom weights, along with tough grass fibers probably used to lash the frame together—key clues the structure was used for weaving, rather than being simply debris from the collapsed house, the new paper argues. The weights were unusually light, potentially suggesting the weavers were working with delicate material such as sheep’s wool, which would have been a relatively new material in the region."
From the abstract:
"The deep history of weaving is attested by spindle whorls and loom weights, so the evolution of techniques may be tracked through changes in these durable artefacts; however, wooden looms rarely preserve.
Here, the authors document a series of loom weights and associated charred timbers and fibres that represent the remains of a Bronze Age warp-weighted loom, uncovered at the settlement of Cabezo Redondo in south-eastern Spain. Based on the number, weight and size of the weights, hypothetical reconstructions of loom setup and resultant textile products are proposed, revealing possible diversification of weaving processes in the mid-second millennium BC."
Evidence of a warp-weighted loom in the Bronze Age settlement of Cabezo Redondo (south-east Spain) (open access)
Figure 1. Location of Cabezo Redondo: a & b) aerial views; c) plan of the site. The red arrow and dot indicate the location of the raised platform on which the loom was documented
Figure 5. Different views of the loom timbers during excavation
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