GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY OF RESOURCES AND SLAVERY
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY OF RESOURCES AND SLAVERY Edited by Martin Bentz, Nikolai Grube and Patrick Zeidler Sandstein Verlag
INTRODUCTION STAPLE FOODS AND DEPENDENCY 46 Martin Bentz Staple Foods and Dependency 56 Martin Bentz Agriculture and Social Asymmetries in the Pre-Hispanic Andes 64 Christian Mader and David Beresford-Jones Agriculture and Social Asymmetries in the Pre-Hispanic Andes 76 Nikolai Grube Kings as Gods Watching over the Maize: The Agency of Superhuman Powers among the Maya 6 Preface 10 Martin Bentz, Nikolai Grube and Patrick Zeidler Global Perspectives on the History of Resources and Slavery 18 Youval Rotman Whence Dependency: A Global Approach 84 Bethany Walker The Politics of Cereal Production in Medieval Syria 90 Alice Toso and Anabela Novais de Castro Filipe Nutrition, Work and Body: A Bioarchaeological Perspective from Medieval Lisbon 96 Christoph Witzenrath Controlling Grain Supplies: From the Muscovite Empire to the Present Day 30 Nikolai Grube Recognizing Dependency in Objects 38 Beatrix Hoffmann-Ihde Enmeshed and Entwined: Fabrics of Dependency. A Multimedia Quilted Narrative as a Digital Exhibition
TEXTILES AND DEPENDENCY 136 Birgit Ulrike Münch ‘Hard Stuff’: Dependency and Enslavement Associated with Cotton in Modern Europe and the US 142 Michael Zeuske Cotton Production and Plantation Slavery in the 18th and 19th Centuries 150 Claudia Jarzebowski and Karoline Noack Shades of Blue: The Interwoven Paths of the Colour Blue 104 Patrick Zeidler Textiles and Dependency 114 Konrad Vössing (Do) ‘Clothes Make the Man’ (?): Textiles, Status and Identity in the Roman Empire 122 Petra Linscheid Silk, Gold and Purple: Textile Production and Dependencies in Late Antiquity 128 Karoline Noack Cotton in the Andes: An ‘Industrial Crop’ from the Very Beginning STIMULANTS, LUXURY FOODS AND DEPENDENCY 158 Nikolai Grube Stimulants, Luxury Foods and Dependency 168 Ludwig Morenz and Frank Förster Beer vs Wine: A Small but Significant Difference (Even) in Ancient Egypt 176 Patrick Zeidler Wine in Ancient Greece: Images of Dependency 184 Nikolai Grube Smoke Conquers the World: Tobacco as a Medicinal Plant and Luxury Substance 192 Karoline Noack The Coca Leaf: An Everyday Drug and a Ritual Gift 198 Michael Zeuske Harvesting the Sweet Gold of the Tropics: Slavery on Sugar Plantations 206 Julia A. B. Hegewald Tea and Colonial India 212 Appendix Picture credits / Copyright information
19 Youval Rotman where at least two entities are dependent one on the other, in a different or similar way. This conceptual distinction between dependency, interdependency and independency is not a given, but reflects the way in which the human mind perceives relationships in general, whether human or not, individual, social, economic relationships or other. In a similar way, independency is defined as the state of being non-dependent on something or someone. This concept is normally perceived in our modern mind as a developmental stage, economic, political, psychological development for example. Modern theories of the social sciences even define independency as the objective of developmental processes. All this adds a moral aspect to the way we define human relationships and relationships in general: the state of being dependent is perceived negatively, while the state of independency is an objective, and often is equated with freedom, i.e. to be free from being dependent. This perspective has oriented the scholarship and the research about phenomena of dependency, in particular in the social sciences, towards perceiving them within a sociopolitical context of power relations. In its most general definition, dependency is a form of relationship between at least two entities of which one is dependent in some way on the other. Nature and the universe in general are composed of infinite relationships of dependency, in which human dependencies constitute particular types related to forms of human organization. The same is also true in regard to interdependency and independency. The first is a dyadic relationship of dependency DEPENDENCY – INTERDEPENDENCY – INDEPENDENCY
20 1 a–b Illustrations from the manuscript Seventy-two Specimens of Castes in India by T. Vardapillay, from Madura (southern India), 1837. The hand-painted images show members of different Indian castes or religious and ethnic groups. Clothes and jewelry reflect traditional appearance, as yet uninfluenced by European colonialism.
21 Balandier’s objective was to create a new methodology to analyze what he called “the biggest political problem of our time,” namely the rise of nationalisms in the decolonized world. Two years prior to the publication of his article, an innovative direction in economics set a new theoretical framework to rethink the definition of dependency in view of international political and economic dynamics of the de-colonialized world. It came to be known as Dependency Theory. Three influential studies3 addressed the economic dependency of undeveloped decolonialized countries and revealed the way they became tied into an international economic circle that made them dependent on developed “neo-colonial markets.” Dependency Theory, in general terms, maintains that the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of others.4 In the 1970s and 1980s this was the dominant theory to explain the economic and political dependency of (at the time so-called) third-world countries as an outcome of colonialism. It went hand in hand with another outcome of colonialism: a “dependency complex of the colonized.” According to this concept, coined by Frantz Fanon, the colonized were trapped in an inferiority complex in regard to the colonizer, and in a state of dependency of the In 1952, the French sociologist Georges Balandier wrote, “The notion of dependency, which was frequently used in political economy and psychoanalysis, has become popularized to the point of becoming an explanatory instrument used by journalists.”1 In a fundamental article about the “Sociology of Dependency,” he called for a sociological definition of this concept and explained its importance against the background of the capitalized colonized world of the After War. Attempts to interpret and explain contemporary events, he argued, required an accurate definition of situations of dependency, domination, submission, and their social, economic, political and cultural conditions. Balandier has differentiated between local traditional forms of dependency, integrally embedded in the social structure of a given society, and dependency as a means of subjugation of foreign societies. The caste system in India (fig. 1 a–b) and the British colonialization of India are two characteristic examples of the first and the second forms of dependency. Both forms, the inferiority they imply and the inequality they create, are sustained and legitimized by cultural rationale. Both serve as means to control different parts of the population, which are realized in different ways. In fact, the dependency that the British colonial enterprise introduced in India challenged the local dependency of the caste system. In both cases, however, dependency is an unequal relationship that benefits one group by exploiting the other and is thus framed within power relations of control. Dependency within the context of power relations therefore is understood to have an economic rationale and is asymmetrical by definition, since it entails the appropriation of resources. These could be economic resources such as labor means or other resources or modes of productions that are used in a way that constitutes a social hierarchy around their utilization, exploitation and appropriation. At the same time, whoever exploits the dependent also becomes dependent, on a very different level, on the exploited, who are the source for the exploiter’s position of power. In other words, positions of power depend on relationships of dependency. Such sociopolitical dynamics also have a cultural aspect. The inferiority they imply and the inequality they create are sustained and legitimized by cultural ideology. This could be, for example, the belief in the superiority of a certain group of people which legitimizes their position of power and the dependency it entails, or the definition of their position as an “advanced state of development.”2 In either case such views justify the inequality that dependency creates as a form of power relation.
31 Nikolai Grube material turn also enables us to examine surviving material traces and remnants of colonial rule and oppression, such as monuments, buildings or economic structures. In dependency research, the study of objects also allows for a deeper analysis of the material foundations and resources that enabled and sustained colonialism and asymmetrical dependency. This includes the study of raw materials, production methods and trade networks that enabled the colonial powers to expand their economic and political dominance. This approach is also useful in helping us to analyze the dependencies between exploiters and the dependent by shedding light on the role played by material resources and technologies in creating and maintaining these relationships. Crucially for the study of dependencies, this development has relativized the traditional scholarly focus on written culture, because the majority of those who lived in extreme dependency did not leave rial artefacts in different fields of knowledge production and social practice. Its perspective focuses on the role of objects, resources and other material elements in shaping societies, cultures and historical processes. For scholars studying colonialism and dependency, the material turn opens up new ways of understanding the complex dynamics and structures of these historical phenomena. Traditional methods of researching dependencies often prioritized the role of ideas, ideologies and power relations, thereby primarily emphasizing their normative perspective. But this often neglected the material dimensions that are closely linked to colonial processes. The material turn foregrounds the material aspects of slavery, extreme dependencies and colonialism. This involves analyzing objects such as traded goods, technologies, architectures (fig. 1) and landscapes that played a central role in colonial exchange and in strong dependencies. The Historians, social scientists and anthropologists have approached the ubiquitous phenomenon of extreme dependency in human societies primarily by analyzing texts and images. As a result, those scholars have concentrated on information and accounts about dependent people and the circumstances of their lives. Our approach in this book is very different. Instead of concentrating on texts, we focus on objects and artefacts – on the material world. It is our aim to explore the material evidence of asymmetrical dependencies and to establish the range of information they contain as an equivalent source on asymmetrical dependencies alongside the written word. Our approach to the study of dependency draws on the so-called ‘material turn’ in cultural studies, and on recent debates on environmental and biohistory formulated by authors such as Arjun Appadurai, Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour.1 The material turn is a theoretical perspective that looks at the implications of materiality and mate-
32 behind any written documents. If we do not want to look at dependency only from a top-down perspective, but also include the everyday lives and experiences of the dependent (fig. 2), it is imperative that we move away from privileging written sources. This requires that we learn to read material culture. Object-based disciplines such as archaeology, art history and cultural anthropology can help us to recognize the significance of materiality and material records as sources for the study of dependency. Material evidence has the potential to restore the voices of the often invisible and ‘silent’ actors of history, and to provide insights into experiences of oppression and the hidden pockets of agency in human societies.2 In recent decades, those disciplines of the humanities that study material culture have therefore increasingly sought to establish links with the sciences and their broad spectrum of research methods, so as to be better able to explore the materiality and production of objects and the extraction and control of resources and their trade routes. Finally, the ‘reading’ of an object also presupposes that we engage with its own history. Arjun Appadurai developed the concept of a ‘social life of objects’,3 based on the idea that objects have histories that go beyond their material existence. Each 1 Aerial view of Ossendorf prison in Cologne (locally known as Klingelpütz) from 2021. Prisons and penal institutions are physical manifestations of control and discipline. Their architecture and organization are designed to supervise, isolate and control inmates, which highlights the power relationship between inmates and supervisors.
33 object has a life story that encompasses its production, the uses to which it is put, and its possible destruction. Objects are reinterpreted in different contexts. An artefact can have one meaning in an ancient society, acquire another meaning after having been excavated in an archaeological dig, and be given yet another interpretation when it is displayed in a museum. This also shows that the significance of objects is never fixed, but rather in a constant state of transformation. This emphasis on materiality does not at all mean that we intend to reject written texts as sources for research into dependencies. Indeed, such a radical departure would reinforce the dichotomy of binary concepts, such as the distinctions between written and non-written, human and non-human, or culture and nature. These dichotomies have deep historical roots in the European-Western tradition. By deliberately including material aspects in studying dependencies we aim to overcome these traditional divisions. We aim to develop a more holistic perspective that takes into account the complex interactions between material and immaterial elements and thus facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of social dynamics. 2 Quetzaltenango (Guatemala), 2018: Kaqchikel and K’iche’ Maya conducting research on the internet. In modern information societies, computer technology and digital tools can highlight the dependency on knowledge and resources. Individuals with no access to such technology or a lack of the necessary skills may find their professional or social mobility hampered, demonstrating their dependency on those who do.
47 The domestication and cultivation of cereal plants, the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’, took place at different times in different regions of the world. It was a driving force in the move towards sedentarization: barley, emmer and wheat were cultivated from around 8500 BCE in Egypt and in the Mediterranean; in Southeast Asia, rice was grown from around 8000 BCE; and in the Americas, maize from c. 8000 BCE. As the cultivation of cereals became more widespread, different forms of dependency developed. One was a dependency on these plants themselves: they became the main source of food for expanding societies, but were always subject to environmental influences and other risks. Mass production and the conditions of cultivation and distribution that were associated with it gave rise to social dependencies. Specialized overproduction meant that it was no longer necessary for all population groups to grow their own food. Here lie the origins of specialized crafts and social stratification, and thereby also of asymmetrical dependencies. The cultivation of cereal crops changed access to and ownership of land, as well as the ways in which food was stored and distributed. Densely populated urban societies saw the specialization of entire regions, and increasing trade. This led to the emergence of dependencies on imports, on distribution mechanisms and related contexts (infrastructure), and on the economic and political parameters. Martin Bentz
48 Depending on the prevalent environmental conditions, there were very different forms of cultivation. In addition, crops were continually developed to produce higher yields. In Central America, maize was usually intercropped (planted together) with beans and squashes. It required minimal tilling and yielded two annual harvests. Over time, artificial irrigation systems were installed and cultivated maize cobs were grown to be many times larger than in the original wild plant. Growers in Egypt had depended from the earliest times on the annual Nile floods that inundated the river banks for several weeks. The fertile silt deposited on the floodplain was key to agriculture. Basins, dams and canals were built to harness and distribute the floodwaters. Water-intensive rice cultivation in Asia also required complex terracing and irrigation systems (fig. 1). In all cultures, the harvested grain was manually processed using a grindstone (fig. 2) or, in the case of maize, a mortar. For larger quantities, and as part of a process of efficiency enhancement, the ancient Greeks, for example, developed lever mills with two moving grindstones. Rotary mills with large hoppers (funnels for feeding grain into the mill), driven by donkeys or slaves (see p. 61, fig. 4), were introduced in the Roman Republic (2nd – 1st centuries BCE) to meet the growing needs of the city’s population. Water mills, which became increasingly widespread in the Roman Empire and allowed quasi-industrial production, represented a real technological revolution. Scholars estimate, for example, that the watermill complex of Barbegal in southern France, built in the 2nd century CE, was able to produce up to 4.5 tonnes of flour per day to supply the military stationed nearby. Grain was made into loaves (fig. 3) or flatbread, porridge or cakes, as well as beverages, especially beer. The food was prepared in individual households or, in larger towns and cities, on the premises of bakeries and other specialized businesses. In just the small Roman town of Pompeii, which was buried in a volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius, archaeologists have found evidence for more than 30 bakeries of various sizes (see p. 57). Many different actors were involved in the production of staple foods, and in many pre-modern societies their roles changed over time. Peasants, who cultivated land as owners or tenants to provide food locally and regionally, existed everywhere. They were particularly vulnerable to crises such as crop failure or war, which threatened their livelihoods: they could become dependent on large landowners through debt bondage, serfdom or slavery. In Roman Italy, there was a shift from subsistence peasant farming to a slave economy, which was based on large agricultural villas with 1 Photo, Japan, early 20th century. Rice, like grain and maize, is one of the most important staple foods for humanity. It is grown in many Asian countries on irrigated terraces. This historic photograph shows men and women in traditional dress planting rice seedlings.
49 2 Painted wooden figurine of a woman grinding grain, Egypt, Middle Kingdom (c. 2100–1800 BCE), Egyptian Museum of the University of Bonn, inv. BoSAe 2125 and 2128, height 7.0 centimetres. Small statues depicting people grinding grain, baking bread or brewing beer are often found as grave goods in Egyptian tombs. Their hard work in food production symbolically shows that the deceased would be provided with all necessary goods in the afterlife. rows of slave cells, as well as various production and storage facilities (see p. 57). In the medieval Islamicate eastern Mediterranean, grain production lay in the hands of personally free, autonomous peasants. However, there were constant conflicts due to their dependency on the state, which owned the land, levied taxes and controlled the grain storage depots (see p. 85). In Russia, a form of dependency known as serfdom developed, under which unfree peasants had to pay taxes to their lord and were also subject to his jurisdiction (see p. 97). There are not very many depictions of grain production, and the few that exist show more or less idealizing scenes in which the workers’ social status is indicated by their activities, their tasks and their clothes, although their legal status cannot be clearly identified. Occasionally, however, the peasants’ unrelenting toil is shown by their bent postures (p. 59, fig.1). This should not be taken as social criticism, however, but instead either as an expression of pride in the hard work, or as a visual means of emphasizing the power of those who commissioned such paintings: usually landowners or officials responsible for collecting rents or taxes.
50 3 Carbonized loaf of bread, Boscoreale (Italy), 1st century CE, Boscoreale, Antiquarium. The intense heat generated during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE carbonized organic fibres, thereby at least preserving their shapes. This loaf provides rare insights into the highly standardized Roman production of bread, in which bread moulds were used. The current war in Ukraine illustrates the fragility of the dependency on food resources: the disruption of harvests and the interruption of transport routes severely disrupted global wheat transport chains (fig. 4). The securing of agricultural land and trade routes has therefore always been a central task usually carried out by state institutions. From the 16th century onwards, securing the supply and correct storage of grain was an important aspect of legitimizing the rule of the Russian tsars (p. 97). In ancient Athens in the 5th century BCE, merchants who supplied large amounts of wheat in wartime could be awarded honorary citizenship. The political rise of the general Pompey in 1st-century BCE Rome was due in part to his victories against the pirates who were severely disrupting trade routes in the Mediterranean. The storage of grain is of great importance for the food supply of the population. It was usually the responsibility of the authorities or the ruler, sometimes also of large landowners or merchants. Control over the storage and distribution of supplies according to the principle of redistribution was an important factor in the creation of asymmetrical dependencies, both among the Maya and in the Near East or in Egypt. The biblical story of Joseph in Egypt is emblematic (see p.98): Joseph, who had been enslaved, was able to correctly interpret Pharaoh’s dream of seven lean and seven fat cows as a sequence of seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine. As a result, Joseph was made vizir, i.e. the chief administrator of Egypt, and put in charge of the granaries; he was able to alleviate famines by distributing grain (fig. 5). It seems that Egypt’s granaries were still well filled in the hellenistic period: King Ptolemy III, for example, sent over 30,000 tonnes of grain to the strategically important Greek city of Rhodes after it was hit by an earthquake in 227 BCE.1 In Rome at the time of Augustus, 200,000 people – around one third of the population – received their grain for free. The purpose of this grain dole, known as
51 4 Photo of a Ukrainian grain freighter in the Bosporus (Turkey), 3 August 2022. Dependency on the supply of staple foods such as grain always has been and still is under threat, including from armed conflict. Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 led to a blockade of the sea routes in the Black Sea. As part of an agreement between Turkey, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the United Nations in order to address the global food crisis, the cargo ship ‘Razoni’, which the day before had taken on board 26,000 tonnes of wheat in Odessa (Ukraine), was able to cross the Bosporus in Istanbul on 3 August 2022. the annona civica, was apparently to maintain social peace in the city (see pp. 57–58). There is archaeological evidence for grain storage from the level of local households to central storage facilities. The large facilities in the Near Eastern and Minoan and Mycenaean palaces from the 2nd millennium BCE, for example, are well preserved. They have many small chambers, just like the much younger (by two thousand years) Roman granaria and horrea that have been excavated in the city of Rome’s port of Ostia and in military camps (castra) and rural estates (villae rusticae). Roman authors such as Columella and Pliny give precise instructions on how to construct such storage facilities, so that they could store grain and other foodstuffs for long periods of time protected from damp and rodents. Models of granaries from Egyptian tombs are particularly instructive. The model found in the tomb of Gemniemhat in Saqqara is uncovered, allowing us to look in from above and see workers loading and measuring grain, as well as a scribe who is recording the information (fig. 6). The crucial importance of the grain supply can be seen in numerous images, especially from the private sphere. Tomb paintings from the Old Kingdom onwards (c. 2700–2200 BCE) show the cultivation, harvesting and storage of grain to show that the deceased would have enough to eat in the afterlife: in the tomb of Sennedjem in Deir el-Medina the husband is seen cutting corn, while his wife collects the ears in a basket. In the tomb of Nakht, the deceased official is shown twice: seated under a canopy, he supervises various agricultural activities that are depicted in detail, which, as the inscription tells us, took place on his own land (fig. 7).
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85 As with most agrarian societies of the pre-modern period, cereal production was the most important sector of the agricultural regime in the medieval and Early Modern Islamicate world. It was the foundation of the economy. Taxes on cereals contributed the highest revenues for the state; bread and other cereal-based products (such as porridges) were the staple of the local diet1 (fig. 1). From the 11th century, military officers were paid through a decentralized system of tax collection called iqt.āʿs, which gave them the right to collect taxes from designated properties; the most lucrative of these quasi-feudal grants were of agricultural land devoted to cereal cultivation. In times of drought and famine, state officials, who controlled the grain stores, hoarded wheat and barley and sold it off at inflated prices. Economic misery and hunger were, in the minds of the masses, associated with the unethical management of cereal land and distribution of grain. In spite of the central role it played in the economy, Muslim rulers rarely intervened directly in cereal cultivation, compared with the cultivation of plantation-style crops as sugar cane. Where to plant cereals, which cereal to cultivate, and how to do so were entirely in peasant hands. Peasants in the Muslim world, moreover, enjoyed certain freedoms denied to their counterparts in medieval Europe. They were not serfs; in legal terms, they were not “tied to the land”. They were not part of the estate; as freeborn people, they had the legal right to move elsewhere. They did not own the land, but they had generations-long rights to cultivation, and these claims were seldom challenged by the authorities. The reality of peasant life, however, was a different matter. Peasant flight – to escape unbearable taxes and armed conflict – was an economic threat to the state, which brought an urgent response. In the Ottoman period (16th– early 20th centuries CE), peasants in Palestine, for example, were hunted down and returned by force to their villages. In the Mamluk period (13th– early 16th centuries CE), peasants were forced to do corvée labor on imperial estates. None of this was technically legal, but it became regular practice. As a result of these factors, a complex relationship developed between peasants and the state as regards cereal production and distribution, resulting in mutual, but unequal, form of economic and political dependency. Without peasant labor, the state would politically and economically collapse. Peasants needed the law-and-order provided by the state to maintain irrigation canals and agricultural terraces, to sow and harvest, and to keep the land productive. There was never any question, however, who controlled natural resources, whether land or water. Cereals were cultivated on state land, as opposed to other kinds of crops. Peasants had the right to a percentage of the cereals they harvested, but neither the land nor, in fact, the products of their labor were theirs. Conflicts over taxes and use of water regularly erupted between peasants and the officials. Violent confrontations could take place at the threshing fields (where taxes in kind from cereals were collected), irrigation canals (where siphoning of water took place), and cereal storage depots. The asymmetrical dependencies of the peasants of the time are most vividly traced at these places, rather than the fields or the villages. Current fieldwork by the University of Bonn at the site of Tall Hisban in central Jordan has begun to reconstruct the details of cereal cultivation and conflicts centered on this industry in the 13th and 14th centuries (fig. 2). The site is ideally suited to such a study, as it was a regional breadbasket for both the Roman and Mamluk states (fig. 3). We have learned that local peasants cultivated a wide range of wheats and barleys, with certain varieties planted specifically for the state and for long-distance transport and long-term storage, and others for local consumption, and short-term storage. For several decades in the 14th century, wheats were irrigated, at a time of repeated drought and increased demands for this crop from the state2. Grains used for local households in Transjordan and Palestine were typically stored in the numerous caves of the region and repurposed cisterns3. Large-scale storage for transport to the cities was done in built facilities called shunahs. The “grain boom” of the 19th century opened doors to local agrarian entrepreneurs in cereal export. Contemporary with this development were reforms within the Ottoman government (called the Tanzimat), which required individuals, to register land in their own names rather than the community. While this did not in the end benefit peasants, it did urban elites with the means and access to credit to purchase land, hold title to it, and participate in the international business of the cereal trade4. This period, on the other hand, witnessed peasant indebtedness, further alienation from land they had been cultivating, and new forms of dependency, as new forms of land tenure developed. As in earlier times, peasants in this period had little control over their own labor, although there were no formal obstacles to their migration to other places. One of the most vivid expressions of this new form of “cereal capitalism” are the qus. ūr – walled farmsteads that contained shunahs. From there the stored grains were transported to further markets and ports (fig. 4). Bethany J. Walker
86 1 Walker 2020. 2 Walker et al. 2017. 3 Walker 2011. 4 Abujaber 1993. Bibliography: Abujaber 1993 R. S. Abujaber, Pioneers over Jordan: The Frontier of Settlement in Transjordan, 1850–1914 (London 1993). Walker 2011 B. J. Walker, Jordan in the Late Middle Ages: Transformation of the Mamluk Frontier (Chicago 2011). Walker 2020 B. J. Walker, Operation ‘Betty’: Deutsch-amerikanische Ausgrabungung in jordanischen Tall Hisban, DFG Forschung (2020): 24–27. Walker et al. 2017 B. J. Walker – S. Laparidou – A. Hansen – C. Corbino 2017, Did the Mamluks Have an Environmental Sense? Natural Resource Management in Syrian Villages, Mamluk Studies Review 20 (2017): 167–245. 1 Walker 2020. 2 Walker u. a. 2017. 3 Walker 2011. 4 Abujaber 1993. 1 13th-century stewpot from a kitchen at Tall Hisban. Archaeological, botanical, residue, and textual analyses suggest it was used for slow-cooking of a wheatbased porridge flavored with figs, a staple of the local diet.
87 2 Excavation of the stewpot at Tell Hisban (Jordan) In one of the ruins of a farmhouse at Tell Hisban, a 13th-century cookpot was uncovered. The pot preserved traces of the last meal prepared in it by the residents of the house, before it was reoccupied by a wealthier family in the 14th century.
105 Patrick Zeidler of Egypt in the 7th century CE that cotton was introduced on a large scale in the region, gradually replacing linen as the main fibre. This example shows that the use of different resources has always also depended to a certain degree on the prevailing cultural character and political power relations. Silk was introduced in the Andean region as a new fibre after the Spanish conquest – a resource that only became available with the change in the global balance of power and the colonization of the New World. Silk production enabled the Chinese empire to extend its influence across the Eurasian continent, including Japan and certain regions of the northwest coast of Africa, by establishing the Silk Road as a trade route and economic engine.3 Today, the global power China is using the symbolic power of silk as the namesake for its ‘Silk Road 2.0’ project, a programmatic initiative involving considerable financial investment that aims to strengthen China’s influence in the global marketplace for many years to come. We all use textiles in our daily lives as clothing and for interior decoration. But they also have an important function as status symbols. For many thousands of years, both the raw materials – cotton, linen, wool and silk – and the production of textiles played an important role in various social and global processes, which were often linked to the emergence of human dependencies, and they continue to do so today.1 In ancient Mediterranean societies, tribute and taxes could be paid in textiles. People abducted from Africa and taken to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade were exploited as labourers on the cotton plantations. Dependent wage labourers stood at the beginning of industrialization in the European textile factories of the 18th century. Even today, exploitation and forced labour still occur in the production of textiles in some world regions – such as in South and Southeast Asia – connected to the need of Western societies for cheap ‘fast fashion’. Different varieties of cotton have been grown independently in different parts of the world for thousands of years.2 Some of the earliest evidence for the domestication of cotton comes from what is now India and Pakistan, particularly the Indus Valley, dating back to around 6000 BCE. The domestication and systematic processing of cotton can also be traced back to the 6th millennium BCE in some regions of Africa, the Arab world and Syria. There is also remarkable evidence for the domestication of cotton on the north coast of Peru beginning with the 5th millennium BCE. Recent research indicates that harnessing this raw material for the systematic production of nets for fishing was crucial for the emergence of sedentary, complex societies (see pp. 66 and 129), rather than – as is often assumed – for the production of food through agriculture. In the Mesoamerican region, the use of cotton for the production of clothing and other textiles was prevalent from the 3rd to the 2nd millennia BCE. In contrast, cotton was largely unknown in the ancient Mediterranean region. Instead, fibres for textile production were obtained through the domestication of sheep (for wool) and the cultivation of flax. It was not until the Arab conquest
106 from a kalathos standing on the floor and passes it over her lower leg, which is stretched out forwards. Next, a small female figure walks to the right, turning her head backwards. The last seated woman in the row is probably of higher social standing: she is dressed more elaborately than the others, in a mantle, and also holds a wreath in her left hand. Two young, beardless men approach her from the right, each with his right hand raised in a gesture of speech. The rest of the frieze focuses on Dionysian themes: the divine couple Dionysus and Ariadne, a large vine and a satyr. The first step in textile production – after extracting and cleaning the raw material – is to create thread by spinning. In many pre-modern cultures, a simple hand or drop spindle was used to produce a continuous thread by pulling and simultaneously twisting the individual fibres (fig. 1). A drop spindle is operated by tucking the distaff – usually a long, wooden stick – under one arm and loosely binding the prepared fibres to it with a cloth to hold them together. Alternatively, the loose fibres can be placed in a basket. The fibres are then pulled out one by one with one hand and fed to the spindle, which is twirled with the other hand. The spindle whorl, which is attached to the spindle, acts as a swing weight to make the spindle rotate evenly (fig. 2). Pictorial representations of women with spindles and distaffs, as well as finds of such tools as grave goods in women’s and girls’ burials, indicate that spinning was considered a typically female activity in antiquity (and beyond). Various stages of textile production in a domestic setting are depicted on a Greek, Attic black- figure pyxis (a jewellery container) from c. 530/520 BCE (fig. 3 a–b)4: on the left stands a woman in a long robe, holding a spindle in her left hand and turning the woollen thread hanging from the distaff with her right hand; a small, naked boy looks on. To the right, we see another woman sitting on a stool, in front of her, we can just make out a kalathos (a wool basket) with a strand of wool pulled upwards, and a standing girl; beside her sits another woman who holds a strand of wool in her hands and turns to face the other woman. A naked boy points with his right hand to a kalathos standing on the ground between the two women; while the woman seated next to them leans slightly forward and braces her left leg against the stool on which another woman sits. She uses both hands to pull a strand of wool 1 Spindle and distaff with raw and spun cotton, Salasaca (Ecuador), 20th century, bamboo, wood, terracotta, Bonn, BASA Museum, inv. 3025e, length 41.0 and 76.0 centimetres respectively. Spindles were used to process cotton and wool into thread. The cotton bale on the distaff has been wrapped in a purple cloth for a better grip. Although cotton and camelid wool were replaced by sheep wool and synthetic fibres in the early 20th century, the old materials are still being used in many rural areas today.
107 2 Terracotta spindle whorl, Greek, Attic, 6th–5th century BCE, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 27.25, height 3.8 centimetres. 3 a–b Black-figure pyxis (a jewellery container) with lid, terracotta, Greek, Attic, 530–520 BCE, Bochum, Art Collections of the Ruhr-University, inv. S 1212, height 11.8 centimetres. The spindle whorl would have been attached to one end of the spindle as a swing weight to make the spindle rotate evenly. Elaborately made and decorated whorls such as this one were also deposited in women’s tombs as grave goods. In antiquity, spinning was the preserve of women. The figurative scene on the vessel depicts various stages of textile production in a domestic setting. Different social groups, such as citizen women, servant women and slaves, are differentiated by their size and clothing.
122 TEXTILE PRODUCTION AND DEPENDENCIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY
123 Textiles, like food, meet a basic human need. Their production, distribution and consumption have therefore played an important role in the economies and the cultural life of all societies. Textile production was already highly specialized in antiquity,1 and associated with different forms of dependency: the availability of resources, forced labour, unequal gender roles and the level of technical progress. These aspects of unfreedom can be observed in textile production in almost all cultures and periods, and of course they have not been eliminated everywhere even now. This chapter focuses on the late antique Mediterranean, i.e. the period between the 3rd and the 7th centuries CE (fig. 1). DEPENDENCY ON RAW MATERIALS: SILK, GOLD AND PURPLE An important source for the study of late antique textiles are finds from Egypt, where the hot, dry climate has preserved fabrics and dyes in amazingly good condition. Most finds are from graves: the deceased were buried in their everyday clothes and wrapped in blankets and hangings. Because of their close relationship to representations of clothing and soft furnishings in mosaics and paintings, textile finds from Egypt are considered representative of the entire late antique Mediterranean region. Linen and wool were raw materials that were equally available in late antiquity. Depending on what was required, people would choose the cooling, tear- resistant qualities of linen (fig. 2) or the warming, dye-absorbing properties of wool (fig. 3). Cotton did not come into wider use until the Arab conquest of Egypt in the 7th century, increasingly replacing linen as the most important fibre throughout the Mediterranean region in the Middle Ages.2 This shows how the availability of raw materials depended on political rulers who introduced their own materials into conquered territories and made sure that they took root there. The textile luxury goods of late antiquity were silk (fig. 4), gold and purple dye. These materials had limited availability because of their rarity in nature and the elaborate processing techniques they required. Silk was imported into the Mediterranean region from China and Central Asia. Written sources report that the emperor Justinian had silkworm eggs smuggled from Central Asia to Byzantium in the mid-6th century, thereby establishing silkworm farming in the Mediterranean.3 True purple, which produces reddish and blue hues, was extracted from the glands of sea snails found in coastal regions of the Mediterranean in an extremely complex process. True purple had been a status symbol since the Bronze Age.4 In antiquity, clothing and soft furnishings with gold threads were highly prestigious.5 The gold threads were made of sheet gold cut into strips and wound around a thread core. With diameters of only 0.1 to 0.2 millimetres, gold thread was produced by specialized goldsmiths. The limited availability of silk, purple and gold thread was further restricted by imperial legislation, which imposed a monopoly, held by the imperial house, on the production and sale of pure silk garments, textiles dyed with true purple, and gold fabrics. However, archaeological finds of gold, silk and purple textiles in private contexts show that loopholes in the law were exploited, or the law circumvented.6 The influence of these luxury materials on textile production is particularly evident in the ways they were imitated: the mesh patterns typical of silk were imitated in cheaper materials such as wool and linen, vegetable dyes such as madder and indigo were substituted for genuine purple, and the luminous effect of gold thread was imitated by yellow wool. GENDER-SPECIFIC ROLES IN PRODUCTION: SPINNING Textiles were produced in several stages: raw material extraction, thread production, weaving, fulling and dyeing. Written evidence suggests that these operations were mainly carried out in professional textile workshops.7 While the occupations associated with fabric production were carried out by men, thread production, i.e. spinning, appears to have been an activity carried out exclusively by women in the home.8 Spinning the thread used in weaving was very time-consuming, with between 122 and 350 hours of labour required to spin the wool or linen thread needed to make a single tunic.9 Only the hand spindle was used, which consisted of a wooden or bone rod to which a terracotta, stone or bone whorl was affixed. Evidence for domestic spinning has been found around the Mediterranean in the form of remains of spinning tools in dwellings in many late antique settlement excavations (figs. 5 – 6).10 Spinning was considered a typically female activity, associated with the feminine virtues of diligence and care. Thus spinning tools became typical attributes of women, both in representations of the living and in death. Spinning tools were placed in women’s graves and women were depicted on gravestones with a spindle. In wealthy households, spinning tools made of precious materials such as ivory, amber or jet were considered status symbols.11 The image of the Virgin Mary spinning entered Christian iconography with the Annunciation scene.12 Petra Linscheid
124 FORCED LABOUR: PAYING TAX WITH TEXTILES In order to provide for the soldiers of the Roman Empire, from the 2nd century CE onwards citizens were obliged to pay taxes to pay for the soldiers’ food and clothing.13 The tax for military attire, known as the vestis militaris, could be paid in cash or textiles. We know this from legal texts, documents and letters. A papyrus tells us that in the years 310–311 CE, the village of Karanis in Upper Egypt had to supply a total of 24 tunics and eight cloaks for the Roman legions.14 A document from Antinoopolis in central Egypt records that in 324 a woman named Isadora delivered a chlamys, a semicircular cloak, and a sticharion, a tunic, as payment of the vestis militaris.15 Apart from his armour, a soldier’s clothing was no different from that of a civilian: soldiers wore a tunic and a chlamys, a semicircular cloak held together by a brooch on the left shoulder. Special padding and protective textiles needed to be worn under the armour.16 Textiles from a military context have been preserved from Dura Europos, a 3rd-century CE Roman military base in modern- day Syria (fig. 7).17 RECAPITULATION Textile production in late antiquity was associated with various forms of dependency, as were all parts of the ancient economy. We looked at some of these aspects here. Slaves were undoubtedly employed in textile production; there are isolated references to this in the written sources, but it is impossible to draw a clear picture from them. 1 Droß-Krüpe 2011, 47–102. 2 Bouchaud et al. 2019, 21. 3 Hildebrand – Paetz gen. Schieck 2020. 4 Bogensperger 2015. 5 Gleba 2008. 6 Steigerwald 1990. 7 DroßKrüpe 2011, 245. 8 Droß-Krüpe 2011, 48–51, 58, 86. 9 Droß-Krüpe 2011, 37. 10 Trinkl 2004; Gazda 2004, 27; Fahldieck 2021. 11 Gottschalk 2015, 116–118. 12 Taylor 2018. 13 Herz 2019. 14 Gazda 2004, 15–16. 15 Livingstone 2023, 89. 16 Wild 1979. 17 Granger-Taylor 2012, 68–73. Bibliography: Bogensperger 2015 I. Bogensperger, Purpur: eine Farbe als Statussymbol, Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 145 (2015): 155–171. Bouchaud et al. 2019 C. Bouchaud – E. Yvanez – J. P. Wild, Tightening the Thread from Seed to Cloth: New Inquiries in the Archaeology of Old World Cotton, Revue d´ethnoécologie 15 (2019): 1–31, https://doi.org/10.4000/ethnoecologie.4501. Droß-Krüpe 2011 K. Droß-Krüpe, Wolle – Weber – Wirtschaft: Die Textilproduktion der römischen Kaiserzeit im Spiegel der papyrologischen Überlieferung, Marburger Altertumskundliche Abhandlungen 46 (Wiesbaden 2011). Fahldieck 2021 S. Fahldieck, Forschungen zum byzantinischen Textilgerät aus Assos, in: B. Böhlendorf-Arslan (eds.), Veränderungen von Stadtbild und urbaner Lebenswelt in spätantiker und frühbyzantinischer Zeit: Assos im Spiegel städtischer Zentren Westkleinasiens, Byzanz zwischen Orient und Okzident 23 (Mainz 2021): 117–151, https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeum/catalog/book/964 [last accessed 03/01/2024]. Gazda 2004 E. K. Gazda (ed.), Karanis: An Egyptian Town in Roman Times: Discoveries of the University of Michigan Expedition to Egypt, Kelsey Museum Publication 1 (Michigan 2004), https://lsa.umich.edu/ content/dam/kelsey-assets/kelsey-publications/pdfs/Karanis_an_Egyptian_Town. pdf [last accessed 22/12/2023]. Gleba 2008 M. Gleba, Auratae Vestes: Gold Textiles in the Ancient Mediterranean, in: C. Alfaro – L. Karali (eds.), Purpureae Vestes: II. Symposium Internacional sobre textiles y tintes del Mediterráneo en el mundo antiguo (Valencia 2008): 61–77. Gottschalk 2015 R. Gottschalk, Spätrömische Gräber im Umfeld von Köln, Rheinische Ausgrabungen 71 (Darmstadt 2015). Granger-Taylor 2012 H. Granger- Taylor, Fragments of Linen from Masada, Israel – The Remnants of Pteryges? – and Related Finds in Weft- and Warp-Twining Including Several Slings, in: M.-L. Nosch (ed.), Wearing the Cloak: Dressing the Soldier in Roman Times, Ancient Textiles Series 10 (Oxford 2012): 56–84. Herz 2019 P. Herz, Vestis Militaris: Die Versorgung des römischen Heeres mit Bekleidung, in: B. Wagner-Hasel – M.-L. Nosch (eds.), Gaben, Waren und Tribute: Stoffkreisläufe und antike Textilökonomie (Stuttgart 2019): 297–316. Hildebrand – Paetz gen. Schieck 2020 B. Hildebrand – A. Paetz gen. Schieck, Seide, Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 30 (2020): 200–211. Livingstone 2023 R. J. Livingstone, When Sorted and Cleaned May Prove of Great Interest: The Textiles from Antinoopolis Held in the Collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Tuhinga 34 (2023): 87–104, https://tuhinga.arphahub.com/article/107369/ [last accessed 22/12/2023]. Steigerwald 1990 G. Steigerwald, Das kaiserliche Purpurprivileg in spätrömischer und frühbyzantinischer Zeit, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 33 (1990): 209–239. Taylor 2018 C. G. Taylor, Late Antique Images of the Virgin Annunciate Spinning, Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 11 (Leiden 2018). Trinkl 2004 E. Trinkl, Zum Wirkungskreis einer kleinasiatischen Matrona anhand ausgewählter Funde aus dem Hanghaus 2 in Ephesos, Jahreshefte des Österreichischen Archäologischen Institutes in Wien 73 (2004): 281–304. Wild 1979 J. P. Wild, Fourth-Century Underwear with Special Reference to the Thoracomachus, in: M. W. C. Hassall (ed.), De rebus bellicis, BAR International Series 63 (Oxford 1979): 105–110.
125 1 Consular diptych of Flavius Constantius, the later Western Roman Emperor Constantius III, 414 or 417 CE, Cathedral Treasury and Cathedral of St Stephen and St Sixtus in Halberstadt, Germany. Height 28 centimetres. Ivory folding tablets, which were coated with wax on the inside and could be inscribed, were used as gifts for high-ranking members of society to celebrate and announce the assumption of a new office. The central panel shows the new consul (left) standing between two smaller figures and making a speech gesture. On the right we see him about to drop a folded cloth (the so-called mappa circensis) to mark the opening of circus games. The sumptuous clothing of the figures, which is shown in great detail, is very notable. In the Middle Ages, the ivory panels were reused as covers of a liturgical manuscript. 2 Linen tunic with decorative panels worked in purple wool, Egypt, 5th–6th centuries CE, Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe, Germany, inv. T 207. In the hot, dry climate of Egypt fabrics were preserved exceptionally well. Most finds are from graves, where people were buried in their everyday clothing.
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