Alistair Dickey – författare

Over the past 30 years, research on archaeological textiles has developed into an important field of scientific study. It has greatly benefitted from interdisciplinary approaches, which combine the application of advanced technological knowledge to ethnographic, textual and experimental investigations. In exploring textiles and textile processing (such as production and exchange) in ancient societies, archaeologists with different types and quality of data have shared their knowledge, thus contributing to well-established methodology. In this book, the papers highlight how researchers have been challenged to adapt or modify these traditional and more recently developed analytical methods to enable extraction of comparable data from often recalcitrant assemblages. Furthermore, they have applied new perspectives and approaches to extend the focus on less investigated aspects and artefacts.  The chapters embrace a broad geographical and chronological area, ranging from South America and Europe to Africa, and from the 11th millennium BC to the 1st millennium AD. Methodological considerations are explored through the medium of three different themes focusing on tools, textiles and fibres, and culture and identity. This volume constitutes a reflection on the status of current methodology and its applicability within the wider textile field. Moreover, it drives forward the methodological debates around textile research to generate new and stimulating conversations about the future of textile archaeology.

This book examines questions surrounding body adornments and its link to identity in archaeology, looking at theoretical and interpretive frameworks that are relevant to the study of different categories of personal ornaments. Identity is a crucial topic in archaeology where its concept is investigated through the study of many categories of material culture. As self-representation, identity constitutes a choice through which an individual or a group want to be seen by others. The volume covers a wide geographical and chronological frame from the Upper Paleolithic era to Medieval times, examining North, Central, and Southern Europe as well as regions in Southwest Asia and North Africa. This book is based on a session organised at the European Archaeological Association (EAA) in 2023, with a commonality, namely, body adornments. Participants explored the ways in which possessing, wearing and/or trading personal ornaments was a means through which individual and social identity could be expressed in antiquity. This volume is of relevance to archaeological researchers, practitioners, and students.